You're dead wrong. She botched the HP/Compaq "merger" (really an acquisition of Compaq by HP) which cost thirty-thousand of HP and Compaq employees their jobs.
Both HP and Compaq were Enterprise Class Leading vendors in their space. Fiorina decided that wasn't good enough, and changed their focus to consumer products, mostly pc's, printers, and digital camera's. She spun off the Medical Devices unit (which was WILDLY profitable for HP) and then ran that into the ground too. How bad was her performance? Things got so bad for H-P that in 2002, Arianna Packard, granddaughter of founder David Packard joined with Bill Hewlett, Walter Hewlett’s son, in a proxy fight to oust Fiorina. That moved failed, but in 2005, Fiorina was finally fired, and given a $20-million dollar settlement to just go away. In response H-P’ stock price bounced back by 10% in a single day. About Fiorina’s service at H-P Arianna Packard wrote, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”
Would you like to hear about how she wrecked Bell Labs Research Laboratory before she wrecked HP? Sure, I knew you would!
For those unfamiliar with the Bell Labs, it was Ma Bell's gift to America, a place where monopoly telephone service was offset by a research business that employed over 25,000 scientists, engineers, mathematicians and researchers.
At the Bell Labs, research was considered an end unto itself, where, according to one executive, “you did something useful or you do something very beautiful.” The realm of the former included such immensely important breakthroughs as the transistor, the silicon microprocessor, the laser, fiber optics, the communications satellite, the UNIX and C++ computer operating systems. In the pursuit of improved communications, serendipity occurred such as in the form of the confirmation of the “Big Bang” theory which won physicist Arno Penzias a 1977 Nobel Prize. Penzias, the retired Bell Labs vice-president for research, put it best when he said that “one of the great luxuries of the Bell Labs is that we don’t always need to get it right.” The Labs did get it right enough to amass more than 25,000 patents.
That all began changing in 1995 when a corporate team that included Carly Fiorina descended on the Bell Labs and began to pull the plug on pure research. According to Penzias, then clearly on the way out, “today we have an environment of interaction, while it is still collegial you now live with business-people.”
A key member of that latter group was Carly Fiorina who lead the housecleaning which let the scientists at Lucent know that they had better start looking for ways to “productize” their research. In 1997, Fiorina was appointed group president for global services and two years later, joined Hewlett-Packard.
What she left behind at Lucent/Bell Labs was a smoking ruin of what had been the world’s most important and productive research lab, an entity largely responsible for giving America the post-World War II boost that helped make the nation the world technology leader, contributing mightily to the prosperity that Americans took for granted but which came in no small measure from the pure research as practiced at the Bell Labs. By insisting that every piece of research be tied to a product, Fiorina and her ilk helped prevent a new generation of scientists from looking out over the far horizon and bringing back the kind of benefits that have come from such then-seemingly useless technologies including the transistor, laser, fiber optics.
It is not "rubbish" that she "took the hit" as CEO -- SHE DID THE DAMAGE. When you're paid $20 million to "just leave" that's not because you did a good job. That was the price for HP to get rid of Carly Fiorina and her incompetence.
Certain CEO’s have a specialty in cutbacks and they’re hired for that reason.