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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?"
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.
Both the Enterprise Server Group at HP, responsible for HP9000 servers, and the DEC Alpha team, were completely decimated by Carly. I spent 7 years at HP, sadly 4 of which Fiorina was in charge. I have never seen such a mass exodus of top-level engineers leave a company. People with 20+ years (often more) IT and computer engineering experience, folks who had technology patents and some of the most novel thinking around computing, OS design, and engineering.
Now, the HP9000 servers are 3rd tier behind IBM and remarkably Sun (which regained marketshare and scrapped their way back into relevance soley because Carly fucked up HP's UNIX system strategy).
The only thing she did right was recognize the Imaging group as a cash cow and not screw with that. But that was because of total fear of the institutional investors backlashing and sending her packing (with her $MM golden parachute) sooner.
No, Forbes, you're wrong. Carly was the WORST thing that could have happened to HP, next to the Compaq acquisition itself. HP should have bought out the DEC division from Compaq and left the low-margin, low-cost PC business altoghether.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
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.
I had respect for HP. Their products USED to be good. Not perfect, but good and when you needed help, there was an engineer who knew that exact product inside-out and would honestly tell you what and how to solve.
Recently I had a nasty performance problem (especially writing) with the MSA500 external RAIDs from HP (should be old compaq stuff).
The first, second, third and forth thing I was told was that it is MY fault.
First firmware; then configuration; then drivers; at last, they said I had to use Kernel 2.6.9 and RHEL4 because anything else is NOT supported.
For 3 weeks I went thru all loops (they didn't exspect that) with people who would say "please try this-and-that". Quickly I would ask "Can you guarantee me, that this will help?".
The answers ranged from "maybe" to "one can try". Further, no one seemed to know whom to talk to for e.g. the Linux drivers and if there are any issues.
I have never spoken to more frustrating and technically inept people ever. Even upper sales people knew about my issue. After 3 weeks I was assigned a technical engineer.
After I did ANYTHING they told me, in the afternoon the very SAME technican would admit when there were simply no excuses left: "OK, this is highly inofficial. But your numbers are not unusual."
It turns out 1) they knew they have shitty hardware and 2) they are advised not to tell.
That is not what I call a "saved company".
If she was any good she'd be the CEO of another great company instead of doing BS speaking engagements. HP survived Carly.
You think that's bad? What about "Mark Hurd".
It should be GNU/Mark Hurd.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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
You'll probably have to find out what company he left HP for if you want to congratulate him...
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.
(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,