Yes and no. The purpose of a business is to make a profit, the purpose of the government is to serve the needs of its citizens. Businesses don’t run a deficit to stimulate the economy or go to war. On the other hand, CEOs usually don’t have to deal with other branches of government the way the president has to deal with Congress. They operate in far more of a command and control mode than politicians do.
Herbert Hoover was an excellent businessman and a failure as president, while Harry Truman was a terrible businessman and a success as president. I’ll grant you that Bush failed at both, though.
Whew, good thing, that! That would be tantamount to hiring someone to run the State Division of Agriculture, because they had a childhood love of cows.
It’s not so much that I think Palin or McCain are incapable of running a business. I started this discussion because I’m just amazed that this failure of a businesswoman that John McCain has named as a top economic advisor has publically expressed such little faith in both McCain and Palin as potential Chief Executive Officers.
But again, I have no idea how your posts are relevant to this thread. Brain surgeons and being able to fly a jet have no bearing on successfully running anything. BUT, the Republicans for years have been saying how government needs to be run more like a business; therefore, why is McCain’s top economic advisor publically stating that neither of the Pub candidates could successfully run a business? How is this statement going to give anyone (for instance, the people who believe that gov’t needs to be run like a business) any confidence in this ticket?
So let me get this straight. There’s executive experience and there’s Executive experience. In addition to that, executive experience is good for running a business, but Executive experience is good for running a government. Now, if we ran the government more like a business, which demands executive experience, we’d be better off. With that being said, a person with Executive experience has very little place in the business world.
Both executives and Executives do the same things but in different arenas, but if you cross the streams, a Republican angel gets its wings?
Listen, whether or not Executive versus executive is secondary. She shouldn’t have said that. At best, that’s awkward. At worst, she has no confidence in McCain or Palin. I think it is the former and not the latter.
Yes, she thoroughly pissed off the board by pushing for a merger which some of the board members opposed vehemently. Then afterwards, she did not get the results that she promised as the PC business was not doing well and the stock was not performing. That still doesn’t mean that in retrospect, the merger was a bad idea. It is impossible to say how they would have performed if they did not merge. You can certainly speculate that they would have performed better. However, there is no denying that they have had a few pretty good years and that the PC side has had a big positive impact on it.
This could mean something or it could be meaningless. Were these people laid off by her? Were they in positions that could actually evaluate her performance? Are they people that can give an unbiased outlook on the major decisions that she made while head of the company? I know a lot of former Bank One and JPMorgan employees that hated Jamie Dimon; that doesn’t mean he isn’t a good CEO.
I agree it’s an awkward statement to make. Though, I think she was good for HP.
Anyway, do people really want CEOs to run the government? The best CEOs that could translate to government are salesman, that sell ideas to other people to make things work. These people usually lack fiscal responsibility and are at worst the pure characterization of a used car salesman, that’s not the mold that I want an ideal president to start from.
The ones with fiscal responsibility would most likely lack the compassion or wisdom needed to govern. My corporation practically invented sigma six certification (it’s a form of process control management). Imagine something like that transversing every governmental function. People hate bureaucracies enough as it is. People feel that others are too money/profit driven enough already. Utilizing this methodology would signal to public that everything is profit motivated. This type of mentality in the government probably shouldn’t exist (to balance books, yes; to balance the social state of affairs, no).
None were laid off, like I said they went to Agilent. (Which for those not insiders, was the test and measurement part of HP that was spun off.) And I didn’t say they were evaluating her business acumen. IIRC, one of the issues was that while costs were being cut, she had an entourage and a few corporate jets. The guy who was CEO of Agilent, and an old HPer, flew commercial and carried his own suitcase. Engineering companies often aren’t too thrilled with arrogant business types.
I did work for AT&T when she was there, nowhere close to her division, but she was never considered an up and comer as far as I could tell. BTW, notice that she seems not to have been hired by anyone else as CEO. In this business, that is a sure sign of damaged goods.
I think the point is, she wasn’t just fired for the merger. That looked bad at the time too, but she was also trashing HP from the inside out with ridicuous expectations, muddled management, and of course the random firings. At best, she had no idea how to deal with a technical manufaturing company (the word I heard from my dad is she wanted to stop making products and exclusively sell customer support(!)), at worst she was utterly incompetent and just there to pillage the place and then bail out with her golden parachute.
Now I know who you work for. I suspect the government would misapply six sigma - certainly lots pf people in industry do - but I don’t see how using it would signal profit motivation. Done well it can yield more efficient processes, costing less and satisfying customers more. Lots of parts of the government could use that. In fact, some part of the defense establishment has won a Baldridge award, but I’d have to look it up. A speaker had the award on his slides at a conference I was just at.
This is just ludicrous. She didn’t want to make products? Is that why her most notable achievement was merging with Compaq? You do know that the PC segment earns far more money for HP than the printer segment, right?
Also, your dad must really hate the EDS acquisition since that is essentially a service company. I guess the people that have followed Fiorina must really be incompetent to go forward with that transaction, huh?
I’m convinced it was a good thing Agilent was spun off when it was. I’ve used plenty of the old HP-branded analytical equipment (GCs mostly) and plenty of the newer Agilent-branded stuff. In all cases it’s good, solid, scientific equipment. Consumer HP equipment these days is, as far as I can tell, complete crap.
I think government should be run more like business and I find her comments perfectly appropriate. I think you’re conflating two ideas, though. One is the belief that the government should be run like a business, i.e., practice fiscal responsibility, etc. The other, and in the news of late, is that whoever is to be President should have executive experience; he/she should have been the ultimate decision maker on a regular basis. The Senate gives a future presidential candidate great exposure to the issues of the day, but it gives him very little, if any experience have to make tough decisions. The person should, as the theory goes, have had ultimate responsibilities and made decisions often. This is one reason people argue for a Governor over a Senator. This is no slight on Senators. It was designed as, and is, a deliberative body.
Now while being a mayor or governor or being a high-ranking military officer gives a person more experience than a senator in the two regards mentioned above, that does not mean that they have all the tools to run a large international corporation. It’s a different job completely There is no reason that the skill set should translate over, even if there is some overlap.
I actually appreciate her comments as they are flat-out honest. She’s not blowing partisan smoke. Now, if you think that she’d be of the opinion that Obama or Biden would be more, or even AS qualified to run HP, I’d wager big money that you’d be incorrect in that assessment.
Well her first comment mentioned Palin only but in her clarification later she added McCain, Obama and Biden. Of course the only thing in the news is the McCain and Palin part of the comments.
It just sounds to me like many responding here are doing their level best to “kill the messenger,” instead of exploring her motive for such an obvious blunder.
Heck!! she’s the “top economic” advisor to John McCain. Why would she say such a thing about the man she believes should be the next President - a man she thinks cannot run a company she ran for sometime herself.
Are you…attacking me for relating information? That’s humorous. Tip: switch to decaf.
I am relating the information I have available to me - you are speculating in response. And your speculation about my dad was partularly stupid, for multiple reasons - the most obvious being that he was considerably more bothered by the things she was removing than the things she was adding. He has never mentioned the EDS acquisition to me to relate any opinion whatsoever.
Should I presume you have some harebrained ideological reason to disbelieve any possibility that she could do anything wrong, or are you just a relative of hers defending her because you have to?
As for why Carly made the statement criticizing her own candidate, I have no doubt that she believes it is true; I also have no doubt that she didn’t clear that statement with the campaign guys first. She oughtn’t have said it even if it’s true, politically speaking, but she probably didn’t think that far ahead about it.
Actually, that appears to be exactly the point she attempted to make in (what I presume was) her second interview when I heard it. She made a point of claiming that the skill set necessary to run a corporation was not the same skill set necessary to run a government and that, in her opinion, none of the four candidates had the experience/qualifications to run a company, but that did not preclude them from running the country.
The first interview, which started out with a declaration by the interviewer that they were out of time, was a direct question regarding Palin only that she answered with the comment that Palin did not have the experience to run a company, but that that was not what she was running for. In the later interview, hyped up by people taking her first comment out of context, she made the point that not one of the four candidates had the requisite experience to run a company.
Because she’s an arrogant nimrod who is politically totally clueless maybe?
Look, there is plenty enough proof that McCain-Palin are not the right people to lead a country in any capacity including regarding the economy. McCain himself has said he doesn’t know much about economics. His historic attitude to the financial system is to be “always for less regulation.” (This despite his claims now to be for “major reform” and “tougher rules on Wall Street”). And it is okay to not know much, so long as you know how to choose advisers well and know how to evaluate their advice - unfortunately his advisers are people who think we have only a “mental recession”, who historically have fought against regulatory oversight, and those who have led these companies into disaster (such as the head of Merrill Lynch).
With all that (and much more) to prove his deficiency to lead the economy of the US why should any of care what a former CEO with an opinion of herself much higher than most others have of her thinks?
No, I’m not attacking you at all. I did not make it clear because I quoted too much of your post. I am calling the statement from your dad that she wanted to stop making products and exclusively sell customer service ludicrous. If she wanted to stop making products, then why would her signature move as CEO be the merger with a company that manufactures products? Further, this company (Compaq) not only manufactures products, but does so on a scale larger than the HP does with their printing segment. It is an absurd statement.
Your information is your dad’s ill-informed opinion. I am not speculating; I am stating facts which make your dad’s opinion illogical.
Finally, I mentioned the EDS acquisition as my speculation (now I do it) is that your dad thought Fiorina was particularly bad as HP’s CEO because she was moving away from manufacturing and more towards service. If he thought that about someone who dramatically increased their manufacturing (Fiorina),he must really think the current CEO (Hurd) is incompetent at running the company.
Yes, my harebrained ideology is that I don’t think someone should be criticized for doing the polar opposite of what they are being criticized for.
I suspect the government would misapply six sigma - certainly lots pf people in industry do - but I don’t see how using it would signal profit motivation. Done well it can yield more efficient processes, costing less and satisfying customers more. Lots of parts of the government could use that. In fact, some part of the defense establishment has won a Baldridge award, but I’d have to look it up. A speaker had the award on his slides at a conference I was just at.