Slashdot Mirror
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.
Well, let's see..... I at one time did have shares of HP, but sold them after a series of decisions HP made under Fiorina including:
1) Less focus on the printing division so they could make "me too" Wintel boxes and purchasing Compaq for an unbelievable amount of cash.
2) Canceling then reinstating the HP calculator line.
3) Getting out of and then back into the storage business.
4) Failing to capitalize on technologies invented at HP.
5) Being way too late to capitalize on the imaging expansion. Although the current imaging campaign (The Kinks Picturebook) is a well run ad campaign focusing on the consumer, they are still missing the Pro level stuff.
If a company is going through significant expansion, one could excuse a series of screw-ups, but HP has not significantly expanded. Rather they have given marketshare to companies like Dell, Epson, Apple and others to the tune of about $10 Billion.
My investment money went from HP to Apple. Fiorina was brought on to HP to bring the company into the Internet era, but seemed to miss that original goal entirely. Companies like Apple got it.
Granted, running a company the size of HP is not easy, but Fiorina's hubris and arrogance have proven dangerous. Unfortunately, this pathological perspective is a model that American corporate (and political) figures seem to be embracing to their shareholders (and citizens) detriment.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
What must be really depressing for her is that (as of this writing) HP's stock is up more than 11 percent in pre-market trading today. That's nearly a $7 billion increase in market cap - how depressing for her. She was worth negative $7 billion to HPQ's value.
More
But her page has gone already :-)
But google cache has it: http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:PX8f_tPqKOcJ: www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/bios/fiorina.html+fiori na&hl=en
(I am sure my employer could not co-ordinate a website update with a press release this fast :-)
I worked at HP in the 80s, still hold stock in the company, and I have been horrified for years at the degradation of HP from a great place to work (and a profitable, socially responsible company) into a soulless, internally repressive corporate tyranny. Bill and Dave would be speechless with rage were they still with us.
Ms. Fiorina has presided over such low points as dumping a profitable calculator division (without even spinning it off or doing an EBO!), and a recent corporate general meeting where the proxy-voting process was blatantly abused and manipulated to ensure the board got their way regardless of what the stockholders wanted.
To say nothing of the shenanigans with trying to suppress aftermarket inkjet cartridge suppliers/refillers. Hewlett and Packard would never have condoned such slimy means of boosting profits; they preferred to make money by adding value, and believed in interoperability and good corporate citizenship (a quaint concept, I know, but I'm an old fart...)
I shed no tears (and gave a few cheers) at Ms. Fiorina's daparture; I just wish I had some confidence her successor will be an improvement.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I had a friend from college whose father works at HP. He hated her. HP used to have this contract with Ford (leasing) and at the end of the lease the cars would be made available to employees to purchase at a dirt rate price. One of the first things she did was get rid of this contract and get (i think) a saab or jaguar contract - which while extremely nice for her - was not nearly so nice for the employees.
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?
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
I used to work for Compaq under big Mike. Then after the merger left, we had Carley. She was an absolute nightmare. Thousands of people laid off. Everyone demoralized. Nobody liked going to work anymore (yes, back in the day work was exciting and the people inspired by a culture of inquisitiveness and curiosity).
Finally after surviving round after round of layoffs and being told again and again that I was next...I began to plan my future around my severance package. I was a walking zombie by that point. Everyone was. I couldn't wait to leave. It was then that evil management told me I'd be retained and my performence expectations raised three-fold.
I quit the next day.
Carley wasn't directly responsible for firing me or not; but she was directly responsible for running a campaign that sucked the life out of every free-thinking individual with a pulse in the organization.
Now that she's gorged herself on the spirit of thousands, no doubt she'll float down to another company via her golden parachute and repeat the process there.
Good riddance. Colleagues still at HP report that there is open celebration in the labs and cube-farms.
Now, HP, here is what you do next:
Successful execution of the above will put you back on the map and in the datacenter. When you've done it, adopt the slogan "HP - when you want the very best." Don't adopt the slogan before you can back it up.
Spinning off Agilent was actually a good idea. Terrible name but still a good business decision.
The problem was HP was a bit too big and covered too much areas, and had too many competitors. They couldn't sell spectrum analyzers to places like Dell, IBM, Compaq, because they had a PC line. And who buys from the competitors.
They also couldn't sell computers to places like Techtronics, Rhode and Swartz, and other scientific instrument places. Of course I mangled all those names with my spelling.
As a customer of HP, I never bought their computers in the first place. They were always overpriced. But I bought heavily on the Spectrum Analyzers, Sig Gens, etc. The worst thing for me in the spin off was the name. I still call the equipment I get from Agilent as HP. Its just easier to say, and old habbits die hard.
I don't think HP will be able to reaquire Agilent. They don't have the cash on hand. The stock holders probably won't go for it either. And the feeling I get from the Sales Reps I deal with it seems that Agilent looks at the renaments of HP with some scorn, and that's probably throughout all the company. And Agilent still makes some damn good equipment. If HP keeps going downhill despite the CEO leaving, I could see Agilent aquiring HP just to get the name back.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
You see that's interesting because the reason CEOs are paid such large sums of money, and receive large bonuses is because of "the value they generate for the company". When a CEO receives a vast bonus (many millions of dollars) it is claimed that this is reasonable because during their tenure the companies market cap rose by, say, a billion dollars - if 5% of that goes to the CEO for the value they added to the company, then great. That's the claim.
Yet here we see that, as you say, Ms. Fiorina is worth negative $7 billion. That's quite a loss for the company while she was CEO. Rather than generating money, she was holding them back, apparently. The question that is rarely asked is: how much would this company have grown, how much would the market cap have increased, if we had just left a monkey at the helm. If the answer is a billion or three, then maybe the CEO doesn't deserve a generous remuneration package after all. Of course guessing how a company would have performed with a monkey, or a random number generator at the helm is, well... not possible. Which is what the CEO club reply on.
Given the bonuses for good performance, I wonder if HP is going to bill Ms. Fiorina for the apparently poor performance under her leadership?
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
I got no problem with anyone changing career paths. I just have a problem with people responsible for laying off THOUSANDS of employees to save money. Then turn around and receive a $8 million severance package.