Word: fiorina
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Carly Fiorina has long struck a tone of defiant self-assurance, and it's beginning to seem justified. The CEO of tech giant Hewlett-Packard proved adept at playing Wall Street hardball, leading her company's ferociously contested proxy battle to buy Compaq Computer for $19 billion. She promised big benefits from that acquisition and last week began to deliver them. HP's quarterly earnings report showed the company stemming losses in its most troubled divisions--PCs and corporate computer systems--and surpassing its cost-cutting goals. HP shares have surged 72% since early October, including 15% last week...
...Fiorina has quieted some of those she calls her "cynics and doubters," who had whispered that a woman with a marketing background was not fit to run HP. But she still faces formidable challenges, starting with generating profits in PCs and corporate "enterprise systems" at her newly merged company, which posted $35 billion in revenues in its first six months. Can she go from being a Churchillian leader, adept at giving a "We will never surrender" speech, to being more of a Lou Gerstner, IBM's former CEO, who was able not only to slash costs and jettison unpromising lines...
...category Fiorina keeps hammering away at is services, a catchall name for the lucrative fixing-up, installing and consulting contracts that midsize businesses across America, overwhelmed by the demands of new technologies, are increasingly willing to pay for. One way to get more service business is to buy a consulting firm like PricewaterhouseCoopers, which Fiorina tried but failed to acquire in 2000. But there is another way. Call it the Gillette strategy. Just as that company virtually gives away razors to make a killing on blades, HP could opt to gather more strength in the PC and low-end server...
Printing and imaging have long been the jewels in HP's crown, and Fiorina bristles at the suggestion that HP doesn't innovate enough (indeed, the company recently introduced the first photo printer that prints directly from a digital camera's storage card). She slams Hewlett's alternative as a waste of opportunity. Roughly 25% of the profit a combined HP-Compaq would make, in the best-case scenario, would come from printing and imaging. "It would be an easy course if we were focused on the short term," she says. "We're looking 10 years ahead...
...this the HP way? Certainly Bill and Dave would have balked at laying off 15,000. In 1970 they chose cutting work hours 10% over firing 10% of the company. On the other hand, Fiorina's gamble on greater growth is about as gutsy as their decision to build an oscillator in their garage back in 1939. "I respect her for being aggressive," says Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel, HP's largest vendor. "And I'd label her a work in progress." This is what the HP story has that Enron's doesn't: a heroine in transition...