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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?"
If you had to name the two most popular HP products, I think you'd say these:
*HP Printers
*DL series servers
They are certainly the only HP products I use (at my company we use only Dell workstations). Obviously the DL servers came in with the Compaq merger - and having used a wide variety of Dell, Sun and IBM servers, I'd certainly call the HP DL360 and 380 the most engineer friendly webserver hosts going.
Without Carly where would HPs server arm be, and would I only be talking about the printers in this post?
DRTFA and stopped reading the summary after the word "rejiggered".
....
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. 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
Personally I think the executives should be the least paid people in the company. And if they don't like that they can moonlight as an engineer or something.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Carly was a nazi manager. She expected all employees to be "yes-men/woman". If you were an executive and did not agree you were out the door. If your division missed numbers you were out the door, even if it was her fault. Most of the exiled execs went to other companies to kick HP's butt. She lost all respect from the rank and file with her queen attitude and work ethic. Just the typical case of "do as I say, not as I do".
Yes, Hurd probably does not deserve the credit. When Carly left, HP employees litteraly threw champagne parties and were motivated again to work. So I guess the credit goes to the board for finally having the guts to kick her out the door. They gave her way to many chances and they should have done it after her first year with HP. But HP has always been extremely AA sensitive and they did not want to boot the first woman CEO HP had.
Carly may or may not have been good for business, but she sure hurt morale and definitely destroyed or at least sent into hibernation much of the "HP Way". People actually cheered when they heard the news that she was fired, and we're finally starting to see some of the HP Way slowly coming back now.
Of course, Hurd's cost-cutting methods have crippled the ability of many of us to do our jobs, but at least people aren't so depressed about things like they were under Carly.
I think selecting Carly was a symptom of HP's decline, not the cause of it. The company was well down the path of losing its way by the time Carly came along. Look at the history of HP to see what I mean. The original culture and values of the company instilled by Bill and Dave were all about innovation, quality, community, employees ... basically the vaunted "HP way". And this recipe worked extremely well as is evidenced by the financial performance and growth of HP over many decades, through boom times and slow times. No long term debt. Very high margins. Unparalleled customer and employee loyalty (extremely low turnover, no layoffs). Unequalled product quality. This is the company that brought us such hallmark products as the scientific handheld calculator (the venerable HP35 and its follow-ons), the logic analyzer, the inkjet printer, the laser printer, the "Pisces" emulation systems, the HPIB instrument interconnection bus (now better known as IEEE-488), 360-series PC board test stations, phased array cardiac ultrasound systems with color flow for non-invasively measuring blood flow ... the list of notable, first-in-class (as opposed to me-too), commercially successful products is indeed long. But as Bill and Dave moved into retirement the company began to evolve (devolve in my opinion). Innovation mattered less than "time to market". Quality mattered less than "cost". Employees mattered less than "efficiencies". Engineering mattered less than marketing.
So, by the time Carly was hired as CEO of HP, they had already spun out the intruments and medical divisions - basically destroying the diversity of HP, leaving it as a computer company operating in a viscious low-margin market. They had already moved away from the concept of autonomous divisions, towards big, bureaucratic, centralized behemoths. They had already abandoned the fiscal discipline whereby all growth was self-funded and moved towards funding growth with long-term debt. And isn't it obvious that the company that was once HP is now just another computer company - nothing special. Sure, they have lots of shelf-space at CompUSA, and they move lots of boxes for a small profit. But the breakthrough, innovative products are no more. The reputation for quality is gone. I don't blame Carly, nor do I give her credit "for saving HP", since the HP I knew is long dead.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
She doesn't deserve any more credit for HP's success than she gave to all those she laid off.
They don't nee to be paid off. Publish something controversial, and you sell more magazines.
Carly "The Hatchet" Fiorina was the worst thing that ever happened to HP. It is a wonder that they survived. Between turning the LaserJet printers from reliable workhorses to disposable junk to the disastrous Compaq merger, she broke everything she touched.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Yup-
Carly sacrificed the design and precision that HP was noted for and made the company mediocre. She acquired Compaq, which had a fairly good PC server division and some of the worst workstations in the business, and then never took advantage fo the Alpha technology that could have brought HP to the top.
Compaq's low-end desktops were a technician's nightmare, but it wasn't always that way. In the early 90's the ASE certification was the least-bullshit, best PC technical training around. In the late 90's the ProLiant line of servers were the only things I'd buy from Compaq, because even if you were Compaq authorized, fixing the lower-end machines was too much hassle. If you weren't Compaq authorized it was almost impossible, even if you could afford it.
For those of you who are interested, the original HP design and precision is embodied in Agilent Technologies. There you find super fine instrumentation, quality design, good morale, and good financial performance. All they need now is a good web site designer.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
We where and HPUX and SOlaris shop. Now we're a IBM/ SOLARIS shop. HP's desision to kill PA-RISC and replace it with itanium on there large "superdome" class machines. And we have orders for lots more of these expensive (high profit margine) machines in the future. This is going to cost HP millions on going and we're just one shop.
She was smart, well spoken, and made solid decisions for the *long run*, not knee-jerk decisions, that are typical of CEOs of public companies. She made hard decisions that will keep HP going for a long time to come. Long-term thinking is a rare comodity in an increasingly A.D.D. world. The next time someone jumps all over a CEO on Slashdot for making rash decisions driven by "what the stock market needs this week", I hope they think back to Carly's reign at HP and see the difference.
Who cares? It's now a boring company that makes boring products.
As a nerd who cares about "stuff that matters," what HP chooses to do or not do is about as interesting to me as what Whirlpool Corporation or Caterpillar, Inc. or Citicorp do.
If I'm buying a computer, sure I'm interested in whether HP's product is marginally better or cheaper than Dell's. If I'm investing money, sure I'll pay attention to whether it's making money or losing.
But when I'm wearing my nerd hat, nothing HP does is likely to matter very much to me. The days of engineering innovation are long over. Whether that's good or bad for the bottom line, I wouldn't know—although, looking at U. S. automakers, I'd at least suspect it's good in the short run, bad in the long run.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
... in effect (re)hiring Jobs as his own replacement. Still, history is written by men who have hanged heroes. Apple needed a leader who could turn their freewheeling hippie crowd into a 'real' company during the post-68k Mac era. Maybe they suffered from a lack of vision, but a little structure and stability goes a long way toward preventing startups like Apple from flopping like so many dot-com ventures from earlier this century. Business cycles are just that: cyclic. Grow, fortify, grow, fortify. Growth requires colorful visionaries like Jobs. Fortification requires boring gray suits like Amelio. Sound business strategy means correctly identifying which part of the cycle you are currently in, and executing appropriately.
Waiting for ad.doubleclick.net...
I can attest to this, at least in a second-hand account. I'm currently interning for HP, and one of my co-workers was talking about She-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (seriously, I've listened in on about a dozen conversations about her, only heard her name once), and he said that the day her booting was announced, he could tell when people first checked their e-mail in the morning because it'd be followed up by a "Woo-hoo!" Even if Forbes is right, the odds of you being able to find a current or former employee who worked under her agreeing with Forbes is infinitesimally small.
(Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. Read on ...)
... All under Mark's leadship.
...etc.)
...etc.)
I can't comment on Carly as a CEO since I never worked at HP. However, I can comment on Mark Hurd's past career.
Mark took the helm at NCR after being groomed by Lars Nyberg, one of the worst CEO's NCR had in its 130+ years. Lars came to power following another (perhaps worse) CEO, Jerre Stead. Jerre was a televangelist type who was all showmanship and nothing else. He tried the motivational angle, and co-authored a book (Flight of the Buffalo) with another corporate consultant (Jim Belasco).
This was when NCR was an AT&T company. Jerre jumped ship when the numbers were really going south, leaving the company for a year in the hands of someone from AT&T who did not care, and fled to the mother ship as soon as the trivestiture (where AT&T spun off Lucent and NCR) was announced.
Lars was a cost cutter in the real sense of the word. He shutdown or sold much of NCR's computer division to focus on ATMs, Point of Sale and Teradata. We froze development on NCR's UNIX SVR4, and stopped making PCs, servers and pretty much anything in generic computing. Teradata has been bought by NCR when AT&T took over, and had really neat technology, albeit a niche market (decision support).
Lars made Mark Hurd head of Teradata, after being in sales for 20+ years. We kept hearing every quarter and year: Teradata is our flagship product, Teradata will pickup, Teradata will change things, Teradata this, Teradata that
The stock value under Lars continued to languish, and while tech companies were making money from the bubble, NCR was stagnating (we did not capitalize on our presence in banks,
A few years ago, Lars was evicated by the board (remained on the board) and Mark replaced him. The word in the company from people who worked under him is that he "decided to be a rock star".
Hurd co-authored a seemingly content-free book with his mentor Lars Nyberg. Here is a brief on the book The Value Factor: How Global Leaders Use Information for Growth and Competitive Advantage, and here is the Amazon link. The Register made fun of it because it had things in it like "information isn't aligned". The book is of course influenced by Teradata being the information store of a corporation, and how it can be analyzed and capitalized on. It must have helped advertise Teradata too.
To his credit, NCR's stock climbed and even split under Hurd, in stark contrast with the Nyberg era. This may be due to his rock star approach and getting more media and analyst attention.
NCR's size is about the size of HP's printer division alone. HP is too big for Mark, around 10X as big.
So, Mark cannot take all the credit. His advent may have boosted morale in HP because Carly was much hated, but her strategies are the ones in effect today (merger with Compaq,
I can't go into details, so a bunch of you may pass this over, but Carly specifically decided to endanger the lives of dozens of employees using HP's aviation services for political reasons.
Yep, Carly came in and got paid millions to fuck two companies at once.
As someone that worked for both HP and the spin off Agilent, the HP way went to Agilent.
I am not the parent:
Lay was just about to go to prison long enough that it amounted to a life sentence. I mean, *just about to go to prison*. He also did in fact know the past few administrations intimately, and probably was still sitting on a lot of juicy info. Now think on it a little, what would you do? Try to bargain your remaining juicy info to hope and get out while you are still alive? Seems reasonable? Now who in the fatcat world maybe wouldn't want that info to get out, and what sort of powers do they have? Now also note: it is entirely possible to bump someone off and have it look like a "normal" heart attack, you can google for the information on that.
There is precedent, lee harvey oswald for one, prime witness, poof, shut up pronto. How about casey at the cia? Ron brown? vince foster? You want a big list, it's out there. How many "coincidences" and timing irregularities does it take to see that at the highest levels "wet work" is a *common* tactic when it is required to protect high level crooks?
The only consistent proven chronic serial wacko conspiracy theory mongers are governent press secretaries.
If you care to out whatever story you have, I will guarantee that you can tell your tale privately. I am the person who wrote the original 'planes' stories, and several other related articles at The Inquirer, and not of the otehr people who talked to me were ever outed. I am very interested in this story.
Please write me at charlie at theinquirer.net, or the address listed above.
-Charlie