4 May
2015
If Carly becomes the President…
I understand Carly Fiorina today announced that she is going to stand to become the President of USA.
My guess is after becoming the President, she will force an unwanted merger of Mexico with USA, resulting in USA losing half its value and 15% losing their jobs and then eventually forced to resign from her post.
You know, like she did last time she was President of something about ten years back. 🙂
She did bring down HP and will do the same over again.
Her resume includes active duty experience in parachuting. If the parachute is golden..
but you can be sure she’ll be prepared for that 3am call from putin … because some guy in bangalore will be there to take it.
Dr. Ben Carson has made it official that he is a candidate for President as well.
Love it!
I was a disgruntled HP employee when she did this!!
The rest of the employees were not much gruntled either 🙂
And don’t forget eavesdropping
isn’t that the track record of 99% of CxO’s?
I’ve been anxiously awaiting a post like this 🙂
Your wish is my command, Brad !!
She’s a joke.
Good lord.. glad that she will not even cross the primary 🙂 I recently saw her interview in Bill Maher’s show and it was pitiful.. no message, no agenda, nothing!!
Rajib, allow me to provide a contrarian view if only to balance things out a bit. I was in HP from 1995 to 2008. Carly was our CEO from 1999 to 2005. While she had started out as a darling of the media & analyst community and soon lost favour with them irrecoverably after missing her earnings estimates several quarters in a row, I have to say that, after decades of ‘feel good’ collegial governance, she, as a rank outsider, had actually taught our company to be decisive & assertive. Before Carly, it used to take us almost fifteen months to terminate a non-performing employee. Carly taught us that prolonging such an employee’s tenure was unfair not only to the company but also to the employee himself/herself. Likewise, before Carly, we were very loathe to discontinue nonperforming product lines or terminate nonperforming channel partners (such was the legacy of sleepy prior managements). Carly taught us to hold ourselves and each other accountable and that there were no sacred cows. Together with 140 other HP Business Unit/Country Managers from around the world, I had an opportunity to see her in person in San Fransisco back in 1999. Still remember her charismatic speech and the audience unanimously chanting ‘HP is back’. Like many employees of my generation/tenure, I had never thought the subsequent HP-Compaq merger would survive its sheer culture shock. However, after about two years, it became almost impossible to distinguish between pre-merger HP & pre-merger Compaq employees in terms of our views on any business issue. The ones that had left us during that tumultous transtion would probably not have survived the realities of the post-Y2K IT marketplace anyway. Of course, HP shareholders paid a heavy price to maintain her rockstar persona. And with none of HP’s three Business Groups performing (the recurring ‘restructuring’ drama hardly helped), the Carly chapter eventually came to an end as was inevitable (and, in fact, overdue). I share popular opinion that Mark Hurd and Meg Whitman have turned out to be more effective and result-oriented CEOs. But during 1999-2005, I feel HP did not have a better internal candidate as CEO. Anyway, water under the bridge now. Good luck to America! 🙂
Prasenjit.
Good points all. I am always up for a contrarian point of view. In my defense, I put a smiley and categorized it as “Humor” 🙂
That said, I understand the complexity of trying to change the culture of any company. It is not for the faint of the heart in any circumstance. When you have nearly 350,000 employees it must be mind-numbingly tough given the amount of sub cultures that were bound to be there. And people, in general always clamor for change and when a change is actually brought in, somehow remember the past to be far more glorious (yes, past becomes nothing but history with all the ugly stuff taken out). From your description, it seems that Carly did a fantastic job on that.
With that said, I am sure you will agree that as a CEO of a public company, there are certain things you sign up to be held accountable to. Missing your numbers quarter after quarter after quarter, losing half the value of the company and none of the Business Groups performing does not speak to any level of ability to perform. You push to pick up a company at $14B and then your competitor manages to buy the same at $4B. You push to buy a competitor and that pretty much tanks your company for many many quarters. I understand there might be extraneous circumstances but that is why you get paid the big bucks. To get past excuses and deliver.
This has nothing to do with her Presidential bid but I do take a very dim view of somebody who cannot deliver at the top level. Regardless of how much culture you changed.
And then if you look at the sizes of bonuses she gave herself and kept focusing her time on talking circuits when the company was in an obvious tailspin, I outright question her ethics and integrity.
Oh no not her again. I was part of her last disaster.