Word: fiorina
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...performance. By early January, outside directors, led by Dunn, ex--White House science adviser George Keyworth, and Richard Hackborn, a former HP chairman who once turned down the CEO job, read her a four-page critique. At a board planning session later that month, the directors, growing bolder, presented Fiorina with her effective demotion. The approach of a damning cover story in FORTUNE reportedly hastened her departure. The piece, headlined "Why Carly's Big Bet Is Failing," included on-the-record quotes by HP insiders criticizing Fiorina and laid out in wincing detail the merger's failure to produce...
...certain respects, Fiorina did exactly what she had been asked to do. Hewlett Packard is Silicon Valley's alpha company, founded in a garage by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1938, when the area had far more peach trees than programmers. HP first produced oscilloscopes, then expanded to other testing and measuring instruments. It was a pocket-protector paradise, its culture defined by the HP way: paternal, collaborative, entrepreneurial, community minded and inconspicuous...
...Fiorina was brought in to drive a stake through that squishy culture's heart. HP expanded into computers in the 1970s, but by the 1990s, its sundial pace had run up against Internet time. The company needed to reposition itself in a new, networked environment. Fiorina grew up within AT&T and its equipment-making spin-off Lucent Technologies, so she was well versed in the dangers of cultural inertia. At Lucent, she had emphasized speed and aggressive sales targets. "Have I taken risks through my whole life? Yes," she told TIME in a 2002 interview. "The risk that...
...more than 80 separate operating units when Fiorina arrived in 1999. She slashed them into four key groups. She not only rationalized operations but also reoriented them to focus on customers instead of HP's engineers. "The board was looking to revitalize HP, and they saw Carly as a change agent," says Richard Hagberg, a California industrial psychologist who gave Fiorina the personality test credited with helping her win the HP job. "They saw her as a visionary evangelist who could oversee the creation of a new vision, [who] was willing to challenge some sacred cows. And they got that...
They also got a rock star. While most HP executives practiced invisibility, Fiorina led from the front. She came from sales, not engineering, and she looked the part, from the tailored clothing to the new Gulfstream jet she was soon using. "I told her that rock stars were probably not going to be accepted by a culture that's understated, a bunch of engineers," says Hagberg. "She's a salesperson, and she liked the limelight." But Fiorina kept her distance. Unlike her predecessors, she rarely ate lunch in the cafeteria or mingled with HP staffers. "She rubbed...