Fiorina says in her autobiography that she pushed back against the pressure for short-term growth at any cost, and two former Lucent collegues with whom she remains friendly back her up.On the other hand, this 2001 Fortune story, which described Lucent’s irresponsible growth habits, cites sources saying Fiorina made it known that Wall Street would generously reward companies that emphasized and delivered robust revenue growth.
And an executive who sat across the table from Fiorina in a big vendor financing negotiation, when asked this week about what he remembers of the bargaining, described Fiorina as being dead set on chalking up a huge sale. He adds: “The press release was always very important to her.”
Fiorina likes to point out that she left $20 million on the table. Of course, that’s using her numbers and assuming she would have cashed out her Lucent stock and options at once. If she had held onto the stock and options instead of selling them, that $85 million would have evaporated.Can I get me a golden parachute heeyah?That’s what happened to most Lucent investors. Soon after Fiorina left, the company began to collapse. Eventually its shares crashed to less than $1 and in 2006 the company merged with Alcatel ALU -0.97% .
Much of the decline in Lucent’s stock price was inevitable—a mania for all telecom investments in the late 1990s raised shares in every big telecom equipment maker to irrational heights. Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that the company’s wild pursuit of growth gave it much further to fall.