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HP CEO Carly Fiorina to Step Down
ewwhite was the first of a tidal wave of readers to submit links telling us that HP Chairwoman and Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina will step down, effective immediately.
Chief Financial Officer Robert Wayman will be interim CEO, Hewlett-Packard said in a Business Wire statement today. Patricia Dunn will be chairwoman. Not much else in the story.
and your share price goes up, you know they must have been doing a damn poor job ...
Hey HP, you can stop sucking ass now! Stop pretending the Compaq merger was a good idea. Stop trying to prop up Itanium. Stop pretending dropping Alpha and PA-RISC for Itanium was a good idea. Stop making cheap printers that fall apart if you look at them. Get those scientific instruments and calculator business back. Just stop being a schitzophrenic Dell!
Just goes to show that a great company with a great reputation, skilled professionals, and a solid product line are no match for really bad management.
[Insert pithy quote here]
...she lasted this long.
While the spectacle of the Compaq deal gave her an inordinate amount of visibility, not all of it was good. Her own profile also seemed to clash with the well-established corporate culture of HP (which from what I undertstand was exemplified by the mostly low-key and self-deprecating style of Lew Platt).
There were simply too many gaffes, and I really am somewhat impressed she weathered it this far.
Carlton Sneed Fiorina, whatever shall you do now...
Seems to me that Carly took HP, which was a tightly-focused, highly successful printer (and other peripherals) company (and let's not forget those fancy calculators!) and turned it into a colossal mess. Buying Compaq was a bust (shocking, considering the the only thing worth getting from there was the last vestiges of DEC).
Look at HP's stock price this morning... up, what, 10% already? Looks like this moved disappointed very few folks.
They need to refocus on what they did best, and spin off the rest.
Best wishes to Carly, and hope she doesn't blow it with the next company she runs.
The problem with socialism is that they always run out of other people's money. - Margaret Thatcher
I wonder how much money she got to be fired, how many millions? Its sick that employees get fired with not much more than a kick in the butt, but execs who do a horrid job get millions on their way out the door.
(Sorry, rather bitter laid off HP employee)
While that might be true, but the fact is that she sucked as a CEO and she made lots of crappy decisions. And, because of that, she deserves to be kicked out, breasts or no breasts.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
It's a very good thing she left. She was one of the very few powerful female CEOs, and she was doing a horrible job of it. I've heard numerous people cite Fiorina as proof that women should not be CEOs.
Fiorina was recognized as a marketing genius at Lucent and that's why she got the job at HP. Fact is it takes more than a marketing genius to make the turnaround. HP lost its edge on innovation, plain and simple. It got obsessed with out-marketing companies like Dell, which were operating in a pure commodity model with a low cost advantage and knew how to market its brand, and also how to sell its products. Though it's true innovation in marketing is desirable to get an edge, it was clear that Fiorina didn't have it. She was using too much techno-babble to get to the CEOs of potential clients and no one else. Those CEOs were not buying it, they just cared about how much it would cost. So HP now has the option to get a true marketing genius to sell these commodities, or return to product innovations like Apple has done. But perhaps it's too late for the latter.
Say what you will about her policies, Fiorina was still one of only a handful of significant female CEO's in the world today. In fact, I can't think of another one off the top of my head, and certainly no other woman heads a company as powerful and important as HP.
Except, if what one is concerned about is the presence of a female CEO that demonstrates that there's no difference between men and women when it comes to performance in that area, you should be glad that she's going.
It's not about being a good or bad woman - she's underperforming as a CEO, period. It's gender-neutral underwhelming work, and her femininity doesn't matter one way or the other. That she's a woman shouldn't matter. To miss her strictly because she's a woman sells women short, and implies an almost affirmitive-action-needed shortcoming in female intellect. Just judge her and other female executives on actual performance, and that will shut down the gender chatter significantly. Her novelty has already worn off, so the HP board rightfully focused on what she was actually delivering (now that delivering PR for hiring her has run its course).
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
It's sad when a formerly great company like HP has been reduced to re-badging other company's products. Even if you think the iPod is cool, HP could have done better than just sticking its name on another company's product. What happened to innovation?
I wonder what company she'll grace with her presence next? Dump that stock quickly...
So she's forced out. Now she can write a book, go on speaking tours, appear on CNN, possibly serve as a lobbyist. Her career is far from over.
But she laid off tens of thousands (literally), destroyed the legacy of Digital in Compaq, turned HP into an offshoring shell, and damaged HP's reputation. Brilliant!
Her short term management style, however, is the American management style. Quarterly profits matter more than profits five years down the road. Acquire to destroy your competition, pursue that dream of oligopoly. Oh, and send as many jobs overseas as possible so you can keep your workers in line.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
I actually thought she was a pretty good CEO, even though she had a lot of tough decisions to make.
In a speech that she gave in around 1998 (if memory serves me right) she stated that the most important thing for any working person was to first make yourself financially independent. Then you can make the decisions you really believe in, without fear of being sacked. I think many of the (unpopular) decisions she made at HP may have been down to that philosophy.
I respect that, it's something I have done all my career, never putting myself in a position where I am dependent on my pay-check.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
I keep seeing how HP was just a "printer company" when Carly showed up. No, they were also the premier test equipment company on the planet, where individual items command six figure price tags. And companies bought them, because such things are indispensible in electronic design. So that gets spun away as Agilent, and HP dives head first into already saturated markets with razor thin margins. Great.
HP also used to make the best calculators on the face of the Earth. Yeah. Calculators. The things REAL engineers use instead of gaudy, buggy, inefficient pocket PCs or PDAs. They made *RPN* calculators. When God was figuring out the initial conditions of the Big Bang, He used an RPN calculator. ;-)
Now HP appears to be competing with Mattel for the "My First Calculator" market with colorful plastics and hip angled keyboard layouts that are just the bomb or the shit or whatever the preschoolers (or those with the minds of preschoolers) are calling things these days. :-\
I've said it before, and I'll say it again until I am forced by act of Congress to stop: NEVER hire a CEO with a last name that sounds like a pizzeria.
And I still say in the right light Carly looks like Edie Falco.
--- Ban humanity.
Like it or not, no printer manufacturer these days is going to leave money on the table. Printer manufacturers invest R&D resources to develop printer products specifically for the intent of selling toner and ink. It's just one of the many businesses that take a generic fluid and increase its value a thousand-fold by injecting it into a specific package.
And I'm sorry, what does a person with a BA in Medievial history have to do with being the CEO of a tech company?
(Insert obvious HP company age joke here)
Seriously, what does it matter? Most people change careers an average of three times during their lives, and many people don't ever get a job in what they went to school for. So you start at the bottom of some other industry and learn it, then work your way up. 20 years of real experience in a particular industry is better than 4 years of fake "experience" at a college anyway. I have no idea if Carly has that much experience in tech, but I wouldn't say her degree is the problem.
(btw, my degree is in film production, but I work as a web producer. Lots of people in the world are in the same boat.)
Anyway, I still say good riddance to her. I actually think that HP's actual products have really improved over the past few years, but the company itself no longer stands for anything. Hopefully the next CEO will continue to improve the products while at the same time improving the company. That was her biggest failing, both in moral terms and in terms of bringing shareholder value.
Now hold on there a minute. Let's look at that in reverse. Basically, if you are financially independent, then you can try anything knowing that if it goes completely to the wall, at least you're not going to suffer for it. What you're saying is that her view is that her job is easier if she is less accountable (no fear of being sacked).
The rest of the world is dependent on their patychecks, and irresponsible yahoos who make high level decisions without taking that into account need to be taken out and shot.
That's the way I'm living my life. But in part it is due to the necessity of the current business environment. There was nothing wrong with getting a job at a place like HP, getting married, having kids, and buying a home, 1.5 cars and a pool. But that meant debt, and that meant dependency upon income for debt service. And today's "fuck the workers" environment is making that progressively impossible (at least, very irresponsible). And that's just lost business ... so it's a bit like corporations cutting their own throats.
Which brings us back to HP, and Fiorina. I can clearly see that Fiorina and her crowd of institutional investors are "fatal cost-cutters". They will cut and cut until the company has little blood left to bleed. Controlling costs is a responsibility, but you have to spend money to make it, and the Carly Generation obviously doesn't understand that.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore,"
You were right Carly, goodbye.
- sigs are for wimps.
"I added Sun to laugh at the steep slope to down, and their share price is going up."
That's Sun Oil (Sunoco). Their share price is being influenced by, ahem, different factors.
I think this is what you wanted.
Fiorina and her ilk care nothing for anything that doesn't have the characteristics of modern business chic. It's got to be sexy, involved, seemingly important, and almost entirely without real value. People in expensive suits, jetting from meeting to meeting, rubbing elbows with "business leaders" and politicians, while dining on corporate credit ... THAT'S what a Fiorina creature is all about. Hence, it becomes easy to understand why people like her would dump entire and profitable divisions. Actual work is a dirty enterprise that has little do with business chic.
I'd go so far to say that actual work (to develop products and service a customer base) is beyond the understanding of a "fad" CEO like Fiorina. I speculate that she probably doesn't actually understand paying engineers to make products. She probably also doesn't understand paying for a customer-support infrastructure to maintain the customers the company had. Her world seemed to consist of making economic threats to various groups (employees, suppliers, and yes, even customers) and then daring people to call her to see if she was bluffing.
People like Fiorina should never be given power over a thriving technology business. In some fashion, we should all be ashamed for having put up with her CEO term for as long as it went. Hopefully she will fall back into historical academia where she can't hurt as many people ever again.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
I remember talking to an HP engineer who worked for the non-profit side of the company (only the printer division was making any money at the time). He was complaining that the company was not doing well enough to give any of them raises or bonuses but it was doing so well that Carly was getting multi-million dollar bonuses.
When you divide her bonus by the number of employees, it would have been at least a couple thousand apiece. She treated the employees as an expense to be controlled and pretty much ruined the engineering tradition at HP that I think made the company what it was. Now it is just another soulless corporation
Well, Carly did say (after she went Medival on her employees and laid them off) that it is not an American's God-given right to have a job - especially not when she wants to offshore them all. I suggest she begin looking for her next job in China, India or Nigeria.
An interim CEO cannot credibly announce such sweeping plans. What they can do is take immediate steps, even if merely symbolic, to restore morale. They could include:
- Selling off Carly's private air force, a sign of management looking for itself while laying off thousands
- inviting Walter Hewlett back on the board (or another member of the Hewlett or Packard families)
- Taking other small concrete steps to show the HP Way is back
- Unpredictable in time, money, and outcome, and
- Often tells you things you don't want to hear.
The current generation of Harvard MBA CEOs fears innovation for these reasons, and Carly was a prime example. The damage done by her and her ilk to the future of the US tech economy has been considerable: Bell Labs, the former DEC labs, and HP Labs constitituted the bulk of well-referenced (eg, important) computing research in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Without that innovation, the US computing industry isn't competitive with production in Asia, period.A good example of the Fiorina touch was the closure and large layoff of the former DEC Palo Alto labs (SRC and WRL); they had a clear net positive investment track record of over 1000%, but of course that was over 20 years. Three weeks later, HP announced the opening of a new lab in Singapore, because "we couldn't find enough qualified researchers in Silicon Valley"!
...-.-
Here's what I've gotten from her end:
1. The Compaq deal had NOTHING to do with market share or "growing the company". It had EVERYTHING to do with labour. The HP my wife signed on for back so many years ago was a VERY well paid and excellent place to work. That was expensive to HP, but it made for some of the highest productivity and (yes, it was true at the time) innovation in the industry. Carlyu, like the rest of the ultra-greedy industrial plutocrats in history, saw all that as an expense. By merging with Compaq, the FIRST thing they did was adopt Compaq HR policies, which meant my wife LOST a week of vacation, and was no longer in the middle of her pay curve, but was now at the top, and wasn't going to see a raise for YEARS, if ever.
This resulted in massive gains to the bottom line of HP. This was followed by massive layoff. Between the layoffs and the destruction of the HP HR system, morale went to the bottom of (pick a Pacific Trench of your choice). Anyone left was marshalled into doing 3 persons of work, and the work of well paid, family raising computer programmers with mortgages in Palo Alto were replaced by well paid family raising computer programmers in India. This didn't add anything positive to the mood at HP.
2. The merger's cover story of "synergy / growth / blah blah bullshit to become #1 copmuter maker" finally unravelled when it was revealed that after all was said and done, they were STILL #2 behind Dell.
3. The HP branding of iPods has been a waste of time, and has only served to "debase the currency" of the HP name and moniker "HP: invent!"
4. The spin off of the Scientific division (now known as Agilent) was in the works for a while, so Carly isn't to blame for the failures associated with that, but the bizarrely mishandled aftermath IS her fault, and is one of the direct reasons the Compaq deal got any traction at all.
Basically, Carly raided HP for millions of dollars for her own greedy ass self. She got huge bonuses while the company declined. While thousands of people lost their jobs at the height of the tech recession, she gave herself a $37million raise. She, and all the plutocratic shitbags like her is the reason why this country is going down the shitter at warp speed. What I'm hoping is that her criminal decontruction of HP (calling it mismanagement doesn't begin to tap the suffering she caused for so many thousands of people) has been nipped soon enough, and that HP will somehow be able to regain the trust of its customers and employees.
I remember when you bought an HP PC, It Was A Good PC. Built like a truck, reliable, and even if it was running a crappy OS like Windows, it did so competently. And when you bought an HP printer, it worked. (The Macintosh drivers always sucked great steaming tourdes, but that's a minor quibble - if you were on a PC, they worked GREAT.) And it worked really well.
Now, if you want an HP MP3 player - you do get a GREAT and reliable piece of gear: BUILT BY APPLE.
They need to take the kind of quality that separates Apple from the rest, and apply it to the PC world at a reasonable price. THEN they will be bigger than Dell, and who knows? Maybe my wife will get a raise for the FIRST TIME IN YEARS.
And I remember when you worked for HP, it was like working for Apple, only without the Kool-Aid effect or the Reality Distortion Fields. You were On Top of the pile - maybe not the bigest, but certainly the BEST, and everyone knew it. I hope those days can return to HP. With Carly gone, they just might!
Oh, and Carly, if you're reading this: Fuck Off.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
My degree is in ancient history. I suppose I should just empty out my desk now? I've got news for you: 99% of what you do in an IT job is *not* about things you could (or at least must) learn at school.
One thing folks with history degrees learn how to do better than most with tech degrees is to communicate. I would submit to you that communication is central to the role of a CEO.
If a vocational education gave one everything that is needed to succeed in life, we'd all just go to ITT Tech.
Not that I mean to flamebait, but IMHO no one was willing to acknowledge the elephant in the room. She _sucked_ as CEO and made a once-good company go from bad to worse. If she had been a man she would have been crucified but it seems nobody wanted to look like a misogynist.
Shares of HP (Research) jumped about 9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday morning on the news.
As others here have already pointed out, it says something about the quality of your corporate executive when firing her makes your company 9% more valuable.
she would receive severance pay -- and a company spokesman told CNN she'll get a payout of $21.1 million, not including stock options.
Appropriate that her parting act is to suck even more money from HP.
Fiorinia was the classic corporate parasite and the HP corporate immune system was too slow to react. But I am glad to see that it rejected her before she killed the host. Like John Scully at Apple, Ms. Fiorina's two greatest skills seem to have been corporate infighting and self promotion. She has modeled her career on the tapeworm. It was only after years of thinning revenues that enough people recognized the problem and sought treatment. But then there are lots of people who recognize a problem only after their pets have lost weight and appear quite ill and then have them dewormed.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Let's not forget that she and managers like her also helped make Lucent what it is today. Oh, wait ...
[Insert pithy quote here]
First, don't feel sorry for Carly. She's made at least $50 Million from HP, probably more. This is a good time for her to make her exit, whether or not she's had a disagreement with the board.
Itanium, upon which HP has been a partner with Intel, is a disaster. HP transferred its Precision Architecture (PA-RISC), the basis of Itanium, to Intel, transferred its silicon designers to Intel, shut down chip foundries that it had spent Billions to build. All of this was tied into their Itanium partnership with Intel, which HP thought would be producing the dominant microprocessor architecture. Now it is much more likely that Itanium will return no significant revenue to HP.
Intel, eager to save their own ship after having bet their company on Itanium, has transferred Itanium innovations to their Pentium line, which they can do without any significant return to HP. Indeed, due to Intel's court-compelled cross-licensing with AMD, we might even see HP technology pop up there.
HP must be starting to see some delayed negative effects of the merger - which was always a daring bid with many naysayers. I think you can read IBM's attempted sale of its PC manufacturing division to a Chinese company as an indictment of the HP-Compaq merger strategy. Where HP chose to "fix" a marginally profitable division at great expense, IBM did not see that its forte was competing at the low end.
Over 6 or 7 years we have seen HP in a transition from a high-margin to a low-margin company. Computers are becoming commoditized, and the 70% margins that we used to pay for workstations are gone forever. But now HP does have to compete at that low end, a very difficult business requiring an almost ruthless focus on efficiency that is opposite of the corporate culture with which they went into this change.
There is also the problem that much of the innovation that drove HP left when they spun off Agilent. That was a high-margin, low-volume business that required a lot of innovation. It wasn't very much like HP's main profit-centers, but it created a lot of ideas that transferred to other divisions.
Thanks
Bruce Perens
Bruce Perens.
You have a right to life only in the sense that the government is not allowed to take it arbitrarily. That right does not include any support you might think needed. The same is true of freedom of speech. It means simply that the government can not prevent you from speaking. It does not require the government or anyone else to provide you a forum, nor does it protect you from any consequences of your speech. Nor does it mean that others are required to tolerate your annoying them.