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Forbes Now Thinks Carly Saved HP
Justen writes "It's been nearly a year and a half since Carly Fiorina was fired as CEO and chairman at HP. Now, Forbes is saying Mark Hurd and HP today are reaping the success of the strategies she developed and decisions Carly made. 'Fiorina's demise was chalked up to bad execution of bad strategic moves, most notably the 2002 Compaq acquisition. But Hurd has always said there was nothing wrong with Fiorina's strategy. He seems to be hewing close to it. He rejiggered the org chart but said he'll keep the company together instead of breaking it up along premerger lines, as Fiorina's loudest critics suggested doing.' Forbes adds that HP's revenues, profit, and market share have held steady or improved since Hurd came aboard, but asks: 'Whose results are these? You could make a case that they are as much Fiorina's as Hurd's. The effects of strategic moves like buying Compaq stretch out over years.' So, which is it? Did Carly kill the HP way? Or did she save what was left of it?"
I couldn't agree more with this post. And, as an ex-HP employee, I will add that Carly's attitude did damage at all levels. During her tenure, HP's management changed from being at least somewhat of a meritocracy to being 100% politically driven. I watched the old guard IT managers replaced by individuals who were little more than political appointees. When I left HP, none of the managers above me (all the way to the top) had any hands-on IT experience. Neither did any of their peers. My manager had a masters degree in English. She had been a copy editor before her rise to management. This individual managed the team which was responsible for handling all of HP's customer facing support content. The damage that she and others like her did and the speed at which it happened still amazes me.
If she was any good she'd be the CEO of another great company instead of doing BS speaking engagements. HP survived Carly.
Look, I know you CxO types are very busy and super important people [sarcasm] but lets not invent new words shall we? All the CEO is supposed to do is look good and say forward thinking things like "We intend to make profits this quarter."
....
It's the actual engineers that make companies like HP and Compaq move forwards.
TRY to run a company with engineers, and see what happens. Engineers build products, not businesses. They just don't operate at that level - it's not a question of intelligence, it's one of focus, perspective, and education. Check out this "fable" by Joel Spolsky for a good illustration.
I don't care how much marketting you spin on your new laptops, if you don't put a screen in [for example] it's not going to sell. Or if the damn thing weighs a ton, or the batteries explode or
It's not the engineers that decide features like weight, batteries, screen... that's what the marketing department should be doing. They determine what the customers want and balance market demand and operating budget with the engineer's estimate of what it takes to build these features and how they impact each other. (At least in an organization that's functioning - I'm making no claims either way regarding HP). They aren't (or shouldn't be) just about trying to "spin" poorly-wrought products.
Some of Dilbert may be right on, but you know... it's not gospel. Some of it is just comedy.
Carly was one of the worst things to hit corporate america since Ken Lay. I watched her run HP into the ground and line her own pockets while doing it. Division doing well? They can obviously cut costs and headcount. Look, next quarter, they have higher margins, so give yourself a bonus, and repeat in Q2. Division doing badly? Cut people, and reorg. Tough decisions deserve a bonus.
Carly was about polishing her own star, from putting herself in front of the company when there was capital to be spent, cash or political, to building a cult of personality. Ask the people shoved out of the way by her bodyguards IN THE HP HQ! Ask the people who installed an executive bathroom in her plane hanger, normal bathrooms wouldn't do there, oh no.
Ask the HP Australia people about the world class logistics operation they built, and then completely outsourced without adequate contract provisions. Look at how much the Magellan contract cost them, and the reasons for losing it. If you want real fun, look at what the board told her before they handed her ass walking papers. Tis to laugh, no tis to feel sad for the greedy ruining the lives of the hardworking.
Hurd, who on some levels I am no fan of, has spent the last year and change completely undoing all the things Carly did. The difference is that Carly had all the shyness and hard working mindset of Paris Hilton, while Hurd gets the job done.
Anyone putting the sucess of HP on Carly rather than Hurd is an incompetent researcher, revisionist historian, or has an agenda. Oh wait, this is Forbes, you know, the ones who are still defending SCO. Replace the 'or' a couple of sentences ago..... Also look at the politics, this has all the hallmarks of a paid for image campaign to prep her Carlyness for a senate run. Forbes isn't shy about politics, and it would take a political strategist with long term thinking in a high place to do this. I won't name names though.
I was privy to a lot more of HPs dirt than I wrote about, and even then, I wrote a lot. I honestly can't think of a more worthless, to the corporation, manager that had the company survive their tenure. The only reason it did was a long history of innovation (real, not MS), good people, and good product lines. Most of that is gone now, but Hurd looks to be bringing a lot of it back. It is an uphill climb, but if you look at Dell vs HP right now, it is the correct thing to do.
The article that prompted this is several shades beyond sad, and completely ignores what Hurd has done. Do the research people, ask HP about the changes, they are real, but they are not spun for the benefit of the general audience like the old days. Then ask yourself why this would be coming out right about now, and from whom.
-Charlie
1) Ruined Compaq
2) Removed faith in HP as a company. (Hello, my name is Habib, how may I assist you?)
Did I mention the talent lost due to "right-sizing"? Sure I did.
If morale is not based on business success then what is it based on?
... being treated like a human being?
Um
I've worked for companies that were making money hand over fist, and treated their employees like shit, and I was miserable. I've also worked for companies that were barely making enough money to stay in business, and treated their employees well, and I was reasonably happy ("reasonably" because, of course, if the company is in real trouble, the prospect of a layoff doesn't make anyone happy.) And although it's by no means a sure thing, it does seem to me that companies which treat their employees well are more likely to get through the lean times than those which treat them like cattle, because happy employees are going to feel like they have a personal stake in the company's survival, and work harder accordingly. If your employer is the type that ends up on fuckedcompany.com, OTOH, you're not going to try to do anything to help it; you will, at the least, jump ship for a better job at the first opportunity, and depending on how pissed off you are, you may do your best to screw your current employer before you go.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Kinda hard to extrapolate from a sample size of two. Some companies, Google springs to mind, seem to have a lot of women at the top, yet aren't management disasters.
It's that kind of reasoning that creates the monsters the GP was talking about. We need to stop excusing the bad behavior of individuals because "society did it to them" or "they had a tough life." I had a tough life, had to work damned hard these past twenty-five years to get where I am today, and I have zero desire to injure anyone just to make myself feel good. Period! I have better things to do. So far as I'm concerned, anyone that does enjoy the suffering of the people in their charge is mentally ill and should look elsewhere for employment. Look, there are reasonable standards that must be upheld in the workplace before it degenerates into a miserable experience for all. If the person in control is not capable of maintaining those standards, they should be removed from their position. I don't care what Carly Fiorina thinks, a horribly demoralized staff is not good for the company, and an organization that tolerates abusive management deserves whatever ills befall it.
... either you know how to manage people or you don't. Even sociopaths can manage others well, if they want the organization as a whole to succeed, and at some basic level understand that the people under them are what will make that happen.
Women wanted into the workforce, they got into it, and now we should give them a free psycho-bitch pass as they rise in the corporate hierarchy? Baloney. If you're a bad manager, you're a bad manager and you should either clean up your act or expect to get your ass fired regardless of sex because your actions are damaging the company and costing it money. So what if you had to work extra hard to get where you are! If you're a woman trying to function in the male-dominated corporate environment you should expect, from day one, that it's going to cost you. It point-blank does not give you the right to abuse people! Sorry, that one doesn't fly and I don't care if you're a man or a woman, straight or homosexual, God-fearin' or atheist
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I have one word to trash Fioina's job performance. Agilent
On July 19, 1999: Fiorina, 44, becomes president and CEO. On June 2000 HP spins off Agilent Technologies. This is a real stroke of genius. HP since then has just become a computer company.
Agilent has since been spinning off its chips business for 2.6 billion. Agilent also sold both the high growth Lumileds for 1 billion and the profitable Healthcare Solutions Group for 1.7 billion. Healthcare has since become one of Philips most profitable divisions. This spin off as a whole cost HP 4 to 5 billion in cash since HP could have easily made the same money splitting it up. This is really illustrative of weak and innefective Agilent leadership and the incompetence of Fiorina. HP still derives most of it's profits from printers and low margin computers and if they had medical instruments they could have expanded the business into MRI's like Philips has and which Siemens has also done. Instead Philips is carving up the best of Agilent and laughing all the way to the bank. Medical insatruments is a high margin business with fewer competitors. The Hewlett's and Packard's are both right she created a new HP that is totally dependent on computers with very little diversification. HP could have expanded into Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Computed Tomography (CT), X-ray, and ultrasound systems and radiology and general imaging.
Fiorina is a totally incompentent executive who's only claim to fame is the Compaq acquisition. Even then without Hurd it might not have worked.
HP had to pay this person tens of millions of dollars just to get her to go away. At the same time they were firing long-term dedicated employees and offering them re-hirement only as perma-temps with no benefits! This was Carly's policy. The woman is a thug and thief. Good riddance.
Now I realize that this standard operating proceedure for America's managerial class. But it doesn't change the fact that it is insane. We had all thought that this plantation mentality didn't hold with the high-tech industry. Boy were we wrong! They wiped out the entire industries stock value and threw away the best workers like used toilet paper.
Carly is simply the flash point of this madness. At least she wasn't assassinated like Kenneth Lay in order to keep her from talking about where all the money went and which politicians got paid off under the table.
I think you missed his point. It wasn't that we should excuse females for being bad managers. It's that there are just as many (if not more) good female managers than bad, but modern corporate culture acts as a filter that usually only lets the type-A personality, over-controlling women rise to the top ranks. Therefore bad female top management isn't because all women are bad managers, it's a cultural and structural issue. There's more than a few sociopath male managers out there as well (i.e. Enron, Worldcom, Hollinger, etc.).
P.S. I've been very happy with and impressed by nearly all the female managers in the company I work at.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
...let's replace every reference to "women" in your post with "black", and see how it sounds.
"I know I'm going to get modded down as a "racist" for saying it, but this is hardly uncommon with black bosses. The last company I worked at had a black CEO, and he was an absolute NIGHTMARE to work with (as were the other two black people I had worked under in the past). He was an absolute control freak, could take NO criticism, let his personal vendettas rule his hiring/firing/demoting decisions, etc.
And, yes, I've worked for some asshole white people in my time too. But none of them even COMPARED to the nightmare of working for the black people."
If you had written the above post, it would get modded down to -1 so quickly it would make your head spin. Furthermore, I'd go so far as to say you wouldn't even bother writing it, because you would immediately be shunned by the people responding to your post, and it wouldn't be taken seriously.
So how is it that you get modded as "insightful" by saying something that is obviously anecdotal, and furthermore, applies to 50.8% of the population? Something that you likely wouldn't even dare apply to the 12.8% of the population that is black.
I am sure there are women boses out there who are tyrants. There are male bosses out there who are tyrants. There are black, white, yellow, red, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and God-knows-what-else bosses out there who are tyrants. The fact is that your anecdotal experiences regarding more than fifty percent of our population cannot be applied as a blanket statement.
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