An Engineer's View of Carly Fiorina's Leadership

prostoalex writes "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."" Update: 03/19 03:13 GMT by Z : As detailed on the TechnologyReview page, they have retracted the story on the grounds that they can no longer vouch for it.

Comments

I had no idea she was that disliked

[jerkychew]

Check out the sidebar to that article, printed back in February. You know you're doing a bad job if your ex-employees open champagne upon hearing of your leaving. Wow.

Carly's many failures...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm posting anonymously because my father works at HP and I have done some work for them and they continue to be a client of my company.

Basically Carly's main failure was a total lack of vision. Her main changes were branding and cost-cutting. And in order to cover her major failing, she undertook the merger which would make success impossible to benchmark for about 3 years or so.

There were also countless re-orgs which also serve to make goals impossible to benchmark. While re-branding HP 'Invent' she did her best to ensure that no actual inventing occured... tying HP closer to Microsoft and pushing the actual inventing to other vendors (the HP iPod anyone?) while trying to eck out a living on those thinner margins by cost-cutting.

Now most business units are facing a 10% budget cut in order to finance Carly's kiss off. I don't need to say that morale is a huge issue and HP is largely rudderless (after being firmly steered in the wrong direction for so long this may be an improvment though)

And there is talk of having her run the world bank. I suppose it is typical in the US this day and age to continuously reward failure as long as it's big enough (Bush, Rumsfeld, CIA, Condi etc.) so Carly fits that bill perfectly.

The whole thing disgusts me really...

Re:Carly's many failures...

[Tangurena]

I spent a while at the Colorado Springs facility of HP. The downsizing was ludicrous. Every Friday would be the last day of 5-100 people. Many folks wouldn't even show up to work on Fridays because they didn't want to have to say "good bye." Morale was that low.

Routinely, the comments on the latest person to be laid off was "this person was the last person who knew how to [some technology or skill here]."

All because Carly wanted a new bizjet. I guess the ashtrays on the old company jets were full, or the steward/stewardesses were too old/ugly or something. About $50,000,000 each for the new ones. You have to fire a lot of people to raise that sort of cash.

Carly screwed HP big time. It will take a decade or more to rebuild and replace the desctuction of Her Incompetanceness. But as the above poster pointed out, we in the US only reward liars, crooks and idiots. Performance, skill and knowledge have been designated as enemy combatants and are busy being rounded up and destroyed everywhere.

Re:more D than R

[cgenman]

It's funny, but having grown up in the 80's and having matured into computing in the 90's, by then HP had already started to fade. Their computers were notoriously crash-prone, their inkjet printers were slow, and their calculators seemed badly out of date compared to the very user-friendly TI stuff (I know about the power of the HP, no need for a flame war). And since then they've only gotten worse. My entire impression of HP, for my entire life, has been negative.

It's really kind of heartening to think back to what HP had done, and why so many companies and people still foolishly hold it in high regard. They really were a tech powerhouse in the 70's and early 80's, before they started rebranding iPods with the slogan "Invent." People gave HP a break for a very long time because they had built up a degree of cred, cred which they have been shamelessly squandering for many years.

But people still care about them. It's kind of heartening that way. Like thinking about your Grandfather when he was young, energetic, and happy, rather than the grumpy, senile jerk he has become.

Re:Remember Palmer?

[sundog61]

IMO, Palmer's job was to make DEC an attractive take over/merger candidate. In that particular aspect, he was quite successful. ;-(