I have no opinion on Carly Fiorina as a CEO, but I would like to point out, in relation to some of the comments above, that HP already had a long-successful PC division before they merged with Compaq. The current success of their PC business is not necessarily an automatic result of merging with Compaq.
Heh. I love this.
“[HP] stock declined 50 percent during the five and a half years she was in charge.” - New York Times
Small wonder now that she is out the shares are trading near a 5 year high. It “worked out” because other people were able to come in and salvage the mess.
Carly Fiorina was a failure as a CEO by any imaginable measure.
You’re sort of forgetting the fact that early in her tenure the tech bubble burst. Also, the company’s shares took another hit at 9/11/01. They bottomed out around a year after that and then nearly doubled from then to the time she was replaced.
Finally, my whole argument is that her biggest move, which she was most critized for, has ended up working out all right. I think that their success, particularly in the PC business since she left has somewhat vindicated her decision.
Wouldn’t that make Carly Fiorina a bit of a…
Maverick?
I don’t know if it got covered elsewhere, but here in the Valley I heard news reports that she was high in the list of VP candidates - which I suspect was planted by her people. It seems likely to me that this comment was coming from her being mad at not being picked and that the woman who was picked was such an unqualified person. (It wouldn’t surprise me if HP’s budget was bigger than Alaska’s). Know her, this isn’t surprising. On the other hand, it does show how McCain seems to have a problem managing his advisers. Very amateurish.
However, the margin of the printer business is 4X higher than the PC division (at least last year.) Cite.
As far as services, increasing services with much better margin over products is something that most computer companies are trying to do. IBM makes lots on this. I’m sure that the comment on totally getting rid of product was hyerbole, but IBM sold its PC business and closed its fab. It’s not the HP Way, for sure, but she might have said it.
Carly ran HP for five years. My dad (as should be deducable) did not last all 5 as a regular employee. (He was randomly fired, and then covertly re-hired against all regulation because his project could not be finished without him. Yaaay, Carly!) The ‘service company’ plan she had was from early in her career mismanaging HP - before the merger was a twinkle in Carly’s eye.
Your entire speculation is based on the assumption that Carly’s plans and motives could not change at any point over the course of five years. Who’s making absurd statements, again?
My dad worked there under her. How informed are you?
My dad thought that Carly was particularly bad as HP’s CEO because she was destroying it. Before she started acquiring and merging she was terrorizing and gutting. This may not be as obvious to outsiders in retrospect since more headlineable and rememberable events came to pass later, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t do the things she did earlier in her career.
Now, this is all a sort of a hijack to the topic of the OP, unless you’re trying to determine whether this clearly makes Carly unqualified to comment on what it takes to run a company. Personally, I think it sort of does; however, I think she’s probably still right, perhaps due to a stopped-watch sort of effect. While politics does seem to be a more similar career to business than, say, car washing is, there are still probably enough differences that your average politician would founder for a while in the CEO position.
Unless the question is whether the politicians could run a company as large as HP as well as Carly did. In which case the bar seems low enough that even Palin could probably decide to buck popularity and advice and abitrarily seek a merger that wasn’t quite so bad that a skilled successor couldn’t salvage it.
Sometimes over enough time people will both do something and its ‘polar opposite’. Before assuming something didn’t happen, check about it, not the later events.