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...toward newer, more lucrative markets like portable photo printing. Coming off a strong second quarter in which profits rose 9.3% from a year earlier, the company is laying off workers--1,900 in the second quarter alone--and refocusing its printing business on the increasingly popular color laser jets; HP has 42% of the market. There is also renewed focus on large-scale printing and imaging. HP has new contracts to provide digital presses to companies like Jeppesen, a Boeing division that produces millions of pages of flight manuals annually for numerous airlines...
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...
...HP had 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...
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...
Though the merger did produce significant cost savings, it did not improve HP's strategic position. In consumer PCs, HP is still getting punished by Dell, which just reported record numbers. On the computer- services side, HP is mostly stuck in the maintenance business, where margins are shrinking. Even HP's best performer--the $24.2 billion printer and imaging-products business, which yielded 73% of profits last year--is under pressure. Dell has entered the printer market and already has a 13% share of the U.S. inkjet-printer market...