FAA approve flying car.
Very belated Monday-morning quarterbacking. The errors made by Ms. Fiorina are not more egregious or emotion-based than those of countless males in a similar corporate setting, and last I heard, Hewlett-Packard is still doing just fine as a corporation. Could she have done better on some of the pivot points? Hindsight is truly a great analytical tool, but unavailable to those of us who do not have a time machine to jump weeks or months into the future and return.
Far as I know, Doc Brown never DID invent the Flux Capacitor, or even the nuclear power conversion unit to generate 1.21 jigawatts of power. And we don’t have flying cars, either.
Doc Brown was able to come back from the future with his two sons, Jules and Verne, so he must have invented something.
In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.
Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”
and last I heard, Hewlett-Packard is still doing just fine as a corporation.
Under Meg Whitman’s brilliant leadership, HP’s character and performance have recovered, but we have not seen Fiorina’s parallel resilience just yet.
Un-"Fortune"-tely, their "facts" have also many errors of omission, and profound misunderstanding of changing printing, communications, networking and storage technology landscape of the time.
For example, she didn't "destroy" Lucent before being begged to save HP from being a market-share-losing printer and disk manufacturing company. Just before coming on board as CEO of HP, Lucent for 2 consecutive years had a 2:1 stock split (i.e., 4x - ironically, on April 1, 1998 and on April 1, 1999 - due to significantly increased LU share price which went from $7.56 to $84 and eventually reached valuation of $258B) and helped set up in motion spinoffs of separate communication companies with multi-billion revenues, Avaya (AV, now private) in early 2000 and — due to 2000-2001 "Internut" bust and 9/11/2001 — delayed spinoff of Agere Systems (AGR.A and AGR.B, later acquired by LSI Logic, which was itself acquired in 2014 by Avago (AVGO), a US-Singaporean semiconductor company.) - Lucent Technologies Inc. flowchart
Fiorina was no more responsible for "destruction" of Lucent (remnants of which were sold to France's Alcatel which is now being acquired by Finland's Nokia) than of Nortel (NT), Tellabs (TLAB), Cisco (CSCO), Juniper Networks (JNPR) and numerous other telcos or CLECs who disappeared from the telecom/networking landscape.
A few months after she joined HP, the company had a major spinoff (approved by the board and previous management prior to Fiorina's input) of the Agilent (A), at the time a $19B IPO, removed from the company's book value and distributed to HP shareholders. Adding that value alone would significantly change the record of her tenure, comparing the stock performance against similar rivals, and that's not even counting the huge value added to combined HP through the merger with Compaq - then a leader in server storage and "portables," with a great end-user and corporate channels.
There had been layoffs at HP, by most counts about 30,000 people, due to redundancies in management and overlapping operations in merged companies, as well as streamlining HP from unmanageable 53 divisions down to 4 and instituting a more channel-friendly policy rather than relying on dying direct-sales policy (IBM and many other big tech companies followed suit). And all that, of course, happening right in the middle of the Internet crash and after 9/11. No surprise that many people didn't like the changes and weren't happy with Fiorina, including the Hewlett siblings who sat on the board while the company had been sinking into irrelevancy, like Xerox and Polaroid. She was, after all, an outsider, not "of HP."
All she did was save it from sliding into oblivion, by restructuring it under extremely difficult economic and political circumstances and with some people on the board constantly standing in her way, while later taking credit for the successes of the restructured HP. Or need we remind how the same board hired "master of disaster" Leo Apotheker after turning blind eye to Mark Hurd's problems?
Sure, she had a lot of unhappy people and enemies. "If you have no enemies, you are not important enough to have made any" - Alexandre Dumas
Ironically, it was the Fortune article that put Fiorina's name on the Big Map: In 1998, a reporter for Fortune came to Lucent to interview Fiorina for a feature on the most powerful women in business. At the time, Fiorina was president of Lucent's Global Service Provider division. Though her group was responsible for churning out roughly $19 billion in revenue annually, Fiorina wasn't exactly a household name. Yet when the Fortune piece came out, she was ranked in the No. 1 slot — ahead of Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart. Fiorina topped the list, Fortune wrote, because she "sells no less than 'the things that make communications work' — big-ticket networking systems and software for telephone, Internet, and wireless-service operators in 43 countries around the globe. In short, she's at the center of the ongoing technology revolution that's changing how we live and work."
After that, recruiters for major companies started calling. The call that intrigued Fiorina most came from Hewlett-Packard. Soon enough, she was the company's new CEO — the first to come from outside HP, and the first female head of a Fortune 20 company.
Also see the post from Carly Fiorina: 'Here's what I will do as Commander in Chief' - FR, post #21, 2015 July 29