Slashdot Mirror
Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina Hired By Fox News
neutrino38 writes "The International Herald Tribune reports that Fox News hired Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO. Such an interesting move will certainly bring support to those who viewed her as the over-hyped CEO who killed the original corporate engineering culture know as 'the HP way.'
The article, off course, does not elaborate on this aspect of things. Slashdot has previously reported her demise from HP and some comments mentioned some HP employee dancing in the cubicles then."
Do you think that the "original corporate engineering culture know as 'the HP way'" is returning or has returned to hp?
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2003/09/15/hp-buys--two-new-gulfstream-vs
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2003/09/20/hp-covers-up-gulfstream-buys
But sadly I can't claim this piece of genius.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2003/10/28/hps-carly-fiorina-hates-fags
-Charlie
When I started at HP they were much like the way Google is described to be now. While I'd have to say that Google is HP on steroids, since HP offered great coffee, tea, and often sweet rolls in the well-equipped snack nooks around the cubical farms, and a well-subsidized cafeteria -- in contrast, Google offers free meals and transportation, among other amenities -- but the idea was the same. HP employees had a lot of freedom towards arranging their own transportation to other HP sites as they determined their requirements to be, specified and ordered their own personal computer equipment including printers, and generally were given a lot of freedom to do their jobs.
Over the next year and a half under Lew, much of that went away in ways that make it clear it would never return. It was belt tightening time, and a lot of it happened in areas like this one, including two job freezes.
When Carley did arrive, she was very warmly received by all of HP. There was great enthusiasm -- and perhaps not too much looking back at what she'd (un)accomplished at Lucient. Right up to the time I left, pretty much everyone was behind her, and much jazzed about having a woman CEO -- and a relatively young woman at that.
Yes things got worse after that in ways are that well known. But in fairness, I saw the first signs of decline before she ever arrived.
Best Carley joke from that era: After she visited our facility (contractors not allowed to attend the actual meeting) we were told that the lovely palm trees in the courtyard were going to be cut down after Carley had found out that they weren't going to meet their 15% growth target for the next year.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
The best counter to the "liberal media" tirade I've seen, shortly after Ronald Reagan died:
Someone linked to NPR (National Public Radio, for the non-American readers)'s story about Reagan's funeral, and said "When Clinton dies, if you can find me a Fox News anchor that describes him as a 'great American', then you can talk to me about the liberal media."
Everyone seems to think Greenspan is this really smart dude, but he's not, and if he is, he is the most Machiavellian bastard ever to chair a quasi-governmental agency.
Let's look at the evidence.
In the months leading up to the 2000 election (roughly 18ish), the Fed continued to raise rates despite low inflation numbers. Indeed despite candidate Bush being lambasted for "talking down the economy" for warning of the very recession he would be blamed for in the coming months. There was much discussion about what it was, exactly, that Greenspan feared. Especially in light of the dot-com collapse which occurred at roughly the same time and lead in part to the recession of late 2000, early 2001.
Greenspan was making anti-exuberance moves at a time when the market was already cooling off.
Either Greenspan was unaware of the impending slowdown or he was actively trying to enhance a recession which would take place in Clinton's successor's presidency. The only reason I can think of to do that on purpose would be to set up the successor (who everyone expected to be Gore) for failure, leading to nostalgia for the Clinton presidency and therefore support for a Senator Clinton 2004 presidential run. Such nostalgia would be necessary to overcome an incumbent Gore's near-automatic party nomination.
It's especially brilliant since Gore would have been unwilling to take potentially revenue reducing steps like capital gains tax and income tax reductions during a recession, a position which would only exacerbate the situation.
I'm not convinced that he actually had this as a plan, though. Its flaws are glaringly obvious to anyone capable of conceiving it. I think it's far more likely that Greenspan is a moderately effective bureaucrat who's had disproportionate superstar status painted on him by virtue of his high post.
It's a symptom of the same problem which propagates the idea of the "Corporate Savior" CEO, allowing an artificially small pool of mostly competent, but not astoundingly so, individuals to command enormous salaries. He was kept on by virtue of a desire not to "rock the boat" in financial circles, which ironically would probably have had more effect on the economy than any of his actual decisions.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
The fact the the Bush administration wouldn't let him continue his plan after 2000 had nothing to do with it at all.
". Its flaws are glaringly obvious to anyone capable of conceiving it. "
You are applying hindsight and finding patterns in noise.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Maybe you could argue that she was just a stupid, bleached-blond bimbo who randomly stumbled upon the correct course of action, but in fairness to Carly, her vision was correct: Only the large [really the massively, monstrously gi-normous] will survive.
HP's choices were to continue to grow [with the acquisition of Compaq] or to die.
[Cf Tuesday's Register article about Gateway: Gateway failed to grow, and now Gateway is dead.]
And the stocks have proven that she was correct:
At HP, Carly faced two dilemmas:
1) Everyone is in the business of selling commodity computers these days, and only the largest will survive at that game [in particular, HP needed the higher-margin server business which distinguished Compaq from the rest of the competition], and
2) Like it or not [and most Slashdotters aren't going to like it very much], there just isn't any money to be made in the sale of scientific equipment, as the history of Agilent's stock proves.
Now you can argue that it would be really "nice" if a big company like HP could subsidize a bunch of really "neat", cutting-edge research [the way that AT&T used to do with Bell Labs, back when AT&T was a monopoly, or the way that Xerox used to do with PARC, back when Xerox was a monopoly, or, to a lesser extent, the way that Microsoft & Google appear to be doing now, while they are still monopolies], but Carly's duty was not to the scientific community: Carly's duty was to her shareholders, and her vision proved to be correct.
Heck, just compare the results of her vision with the current state of affairs at IBM, whose stock has been absolutely stagnant for the last eight years:
QED.
"Fiscal responsibility", while still touted by Republican apologists and a few old-school Republicans, is no longer part of the Republican Party's credo. Now, they believe dogmatically in deficit spending. Basically, since the government can print money, they think the government should print more money for the Federal Reserve, borrow it, and then spend it. Since they're just borrowing on America's future value, which in their view is infinite, there's really no end to the gravy train: they can spend as much as they want.
I'm not kidding; I've argued with Republicans about this very subject, and this is their view. They see no problem at all with deficit spending, and think there should be no limits to it.
Rush's theory is that it is a example of group-think. You have people squished into a room all day. They become friends, etc, etc. They start to use the same language. It's not unnecessarily nefarious. It is just lazy.