Once again, a new management team was brought in.
Why?
Either she was cutting it or she wasn’t.
She wasn’t.
No person would ever be deemed to have been a bad CEO, if your model is realistic. A bad CEO is replaced, and the company turns around. Hence the moves the prior CEO made were vindicated.
This eliminates most CEOs from ever being held responsible.
I’m not buying it.
The changes were difficult and painful for the HP old guard to accept and they hated Florina for tearing apart their little slice of nirvana and hated her because the direction of the electronics industry and the end of the Cold War had killed the lucrative HP business model.
For her part, Florina was a polarizing personality who had no qualms about antagonizing HP’s entrenched employees and their vested interests in the status quo that was dragging HP towards bankruptcy.
In the end, the working relationship between Fiorina and vested HP employees and management broke down to the point where it became a issue of entrenched employees and management vs Fiorina.
Fiorina lost but her replacement followed the Fiorina business plan almost to the letter and the company has successfully remade itself.
The same cannot be said for IBM, DEC, SGI, Burrows, Control Data Corp, Cray Research, NCR, Honeywell, Zilog, Rockwell, Commodore, Amdhal, UNIVAC, Scientific Data Systems, SUN microsystems , NeXT, Sperry - Rand and a whole universe of companies that once were but no longer are.