Fiorina's Confrontational Tenure at Hewlett Comes to a Close

Illustration by Nick Bilton
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Published: February 10, 2005
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Andreas Meier/Reuters
When Carleton Fiorina was asked last month to describe her relationship with Hewlett-Packard's board, she said, "excellent." This week, after six years as chief executive, she was told she had to go.
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(Page 2 of 2) Today, employees recalled Ms. Fiorina's penchant for holding pep rallies for employees, where she would frequently take over sporting venues and make appearances complete with light shows and celebrities Magic Johnson, like former pro basketball star, or Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood luminary. "They were like political rallies and they were totally foreign to H.P.'s culture," said one employee. The most recent event was in San Diego in December, the headquarters of the company's successful printer decision and the home base of Vyomesh Joshi, a veteran Hewlett executive who recently was given control of the company's combined printer and personal computing. Ms. Fiorina filled the San Diego Convention Center with 1,600 employees and broadcast the event around the world on satellite television, while executives back at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, fretted about a day of lost productivity. Becoming the most powerful female executive in the country brought Ms. Fiorina both immense celebrity and intense scrutiny of her management performance and her role as a woman executive. Within Hewlett, the appointment of a female chief executive was consistent with the company's longtime commitment to promoting women. But her sudden departure raises the inevitable question of whether her gender in a male-dominated Silicon Valley engineering culture was an issue. Industry experts and company employees insist that her gender was not the issue. "This is a company that for many years has been committed to gender equity," said Rosabeth Kanter, a professor at the Harvard Business School and the author of "Confidence," a management book about leadership. Michael Useem, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, agreed: "In this era where there is so much demand for results, boards are looking at results. A 'Carl' Fiorina would have been subjected to the same pressures." Ms. Fiorina was the company's chief executive for almost six years, approximately double the average tenure of chief executive officers today. "Her disposal might have been harsher than what occurs with men," said Susan Kalla, senior technology analyst at Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Company in New York, "but you can make the case that she outperformed all her average male counterparts." A far bigger liability for Ms. Fiorina was the fact that she was an outsider, Ms. Kanter said. "Ms. Fiorina might have set herself up for failure from the beginning when she put herself in H.P. commercials," she said. "She was an outsider, and that doesn't bode well for building support." Ms. Fiorina's cult of personality was immediately visible to even a casual visitor to the company. In the entryway of the corporate headquarters, her portrait hung boldly adjacent to portraits of the company's legendary and revered founders, William Hewlett and David Packard. "You either loved Carly or you didn't," one mid-level Hewlett Packard manager said. "There was not a lot of in-between inside the company." Ms. Kanter said the fact that powerful forces within the company opposed Hewlett's acquisition of Compaq also contributed to her demise. "The people who lost the battle continued to oppose her," she said. When Ms. Fiorina, who is now 50 years old, took the reins at Hewlett, she became the first outsider to ever run the company. Her appointment as chief executive drew attention in part because she was the only candidate for the job without direct experience in the computer business. Rather, her world was that of telephone equipment. At the time, she was group president of Lucent Technologies' Global Service Provider business, a $20 billion business in which her customers were long-distance and local telephone companies, and Internet and wireless service providers. Prior to that, Ms. Fiorina had been instrumental in AT&T's 1996 spinoff of Lucent, and in helping create the new company's brand image. Soon she found herself running Lucent's consumer business. She deserved her star status at Lucent, said Ashton Peery, a former company executive who was head of strategy and business development at the time. "The question is to look at the magnitude of the challenge she took on at H.P.," he said. Quite possibly, "when you attempt to merge two behemoths like H.P. and Compaq, it's an impossible task."Ms. Fiorina, who grew up Cara Carleton Sneed, came to Hewlett via a circuitous route. After graduating from Stanford University with a degree in medieval history and philosophy, she took a variety of jobs, including as an assistant in a financial services company and as a translator for Italian businessmen traveling in the states. She went to law school, but dropped out after a year, much to the disappointment of her father, an attorney. But she went back to school and earned an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland and eventually a masters in science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School. Her first job after business school was a low-level position at AT&T's government sales office in Washington. According to the folklore, she made it clear she didn't intend to stay long. She stayed nearly 16 years at AT&T, and another three at Lucent. Although there has been widespread Silicon Valley speculation that Ms. Fiorina's stay as Hewlett's chief executive was only a waystation on her path to a political career, that does not seem to be an option at the moment. Today, on a busy e-mail discussion group for former Hewlett employees, the overwhelming consensus was that the board of directors had corrected an error far too slowly. "This is great news," one bitter ex-employee wrote. "Unfortunately for us it really does not matter. We will not get our jobs back. My sense is that Carly has done the damage. I do not think that H.P. will survive what she has done."
Laurie Flynn contributed reporting from San Francisco for this article and Gretchen Morgenson from New York.
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