And it's true that there were few profits to be found in the PC business in the years after the merger. However, the merger occurred in the midst of the recession, which was particularly brutal for technology companies. HP and Compaq would have struggled even if they had stayed as separate companies. And while losses in the PC sector were bad, it's quite possible that the efficiency gains achieved in other parts of the company more than offset the increased exposure to the PC business.
But he doesn't cite any hard evidence for this. And the same seems to be true of the many other Fiorina takedowns that have popped up over the years: they all claim she ruined the company, but it's hard to find any hard numbers to back up the the claim. It's also true that Fiorina's own boasts about her tenure don't really stand up to scrutiny. Fiorina liked to boast that she "doubled revenue" during her time at the company, but that's largely because of the Compaq merger rather than organic growth she created.
She also claims to have boosted the company's growth rate, but that seems to be the result of cherry-picking statistics. The bottom line seems to be that Fiorina's tenure was neither a big failure nor a big success.
She managed HP during one of the most difficult periods in Silicon Valley history, and was forced to lay off tens of thousands of people. That has naturally made her a lightning rod of criticism. But the evidence that she ran the company into the ground just isn't there. Critics have cited Fiorina's firing, which occurred about three years after the merger, as another piece of evidence that she did a poor job running HP, but the firing may be a reflection of HP's dysfunctional board more than problems with Fiorina's leadership.
We don't know exactly why Fiorina was fired. In Fiorina's version of the story, the firing came about after Fiorina reacted angrily to an anonymous board member leaking private information to the press. In her memoir, Fiorina claims the board never explained why she was being fired or gave her a chance to address her critics' concerns.
And as far as I can tell, HP board members have never given a clear explanation for why they let her go. What we do know is that the board that fired Fiorina proved to be highly dysfunctional.
After Fiorina's departure, the board became embroiled in allegations that it had used legally dubious means to obtain peoples' phone records in an effort to determine the source of the leaks that had occurred in the runup to Fiorina's firing.
Board chair Patricia Dunn was forced to resign in as a result of the scandal. Of course, the fact that the board was troubled doesn't prove that Fiorina's firing was unjustified. But neither does the fact that she was fired demonstrate Fiorina was doing a poor job.
The firing may have been the result of personality conflicts, less-than-stellar performance, or — most likely — some combination of the two.
And as Fiorina pointed out in Wednesday night's debate, one member of the board that fired her, venture capitalist Tom Perkins, now says he regrets the decision. She's an energetic and accomplished executive with a wealth of experience managing large organizations.
Her victory in the Compaq merger fight — which required many weeks of grueling meetings and phone calls with shareholders to convince them of the deal's merits — suggest that she has the kind of political skills and work ethic the presidency would demand. But that's asking the wrong question — like judging Ben Carson's fitness for the presidency based on whether he was a great doctor or just a pretty good one. The real question is whether she can convince voters that she has the best vision for the country's future.
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Thursday, Nov The Latest. World Agents for Change. Health Long-Term Care. For Teachers. NewsHour Shop. About Feedback Funders Support Jobs. Close Menu. Email Address Subscribe. Yes Not now. As Carly Fiorina enjoys a surge in recent opinion polls in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, her record as former CEO of Hewlett Packard HP is being put under the microscope. Fiorina herself cites that record as part of the reason to elect her president — even though some have called her one of the worst CEOs of her era.
Long before Fiorina threw her hat in the ring of Republican presidential hopefuls, I spent time at HP conducting research for my book, Rapid Transformation. I interviewed more than 50 executives and mid-level managers who had worked for HP in the timeframe, many of whom reported to Fiorina and subsequently worked with her successor, Mark Hurd.
In that context, she was what we want our change leaders to be — bold and disruptive. Although the early merger integration was successful, it ultimately missed key mid- and long-term goals under Fiorina. She was weak in execution and implementation, a problem that would dog her tenure at HP.
But, that style, though attractive, isolated her from many of her senior leaders. She was the disruptive leader she needed to be at the time, but she missed one key element. She never took the time to develop rapport with individual employees, and therefore never got buy-in or support for her initiatives. HP culture at that time was very engineer-dominated, and relatively male-dominated.
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