Speak Forcefully

An Engineer's View of Carly Fiorina's Leadership

From Slashdot..."There is a pretty damning look at Carly Fiorina's leadership while at HP on TechnologyReview.com. The author was working for HP Labs, the center of invention and innovation for the company, only to be told that nothing exciting will happen in the tech market since it's a mature industry. He left the company in 2003. "The lab was never packed with genius marketers. Carly told us we had no business sense, and that every project needed to make a profit within three years or less. She usually said that right before the research budget got slashed again and more lab employees were laid off.""

Pre-Empire - I remember sitting in the college library toward the end of my undergrad and paging through an issue of a business magazine covering Carly Fiorina. What I saw troubled me, but it wasn't because the new CEO of HP was a woman, rather it was because in the interview she was long on buzzwords and jargon and short on substance.

She showed her stuff when she pushed to have HP acquire/merge with Compaq, the net result being... the lousy investment that Walter Hewlett said it would end up being. In fact, Walter Hewlett waged war against Carly Fiorina and sadly lost. The damage has been done and I don’t think HP will ever recover. What makes the HP story even harder for engineers to stomach is that managers of Carly Fiorina’s ilk often get elevated to even greener pastures, which in this case is going to be a job heading up The World Bank. Looking at her bio, and this is news to me, Carly led HP into reinventing itself as a "digital entertainment company." And here, this whole time, I thought they made printers.

posted by majqa @ 7:10 PM