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."

Comments

A Question for Current HP employees..

[pentalive]

Do you think that the "original corporate engineering culture know as 'the HP way'" is returning or has returned to hp?

Re:A Question for Current HP employees..

[rubycodez]

no, they finished laying off all the good engineers over a year ago, they're going down the crapper. still pushing technology customers don't need and don't want, like itanium2 and freakin' ethernet NFS/CFS NAS appliances in front of fibre SAN for "high performance databases" to protect the customer "from having to deal with complexity of fibre SAN and disk arrays".

Re:A Question for Current HP employees..

[gaffle]

I agree with this totally.

As an employee of HP only because they bought my company, I can attest to the fact that HP is no longer a monolithic institution, but rather a bunch of components jammed up against each other operating largely autonomously.

It's what the stockholders want I guess, and will only become more prevalent as HP continues its pace of rapid acquisitions.

Best of luck!

[griffjon]

I hope she brings Fox the same integrity and good business sense that she brought to HP.

Re:Best of luck!

[sg3000]

> I hope she brings Fox the same integrity and good business sense that she brought to HP.

I'm sure we will.

Now we'll finally get the answer to the question "Which is harder? Running a first rate company into the ground, or being a Bush economic policy apologist?"

For those of you keeping score at home, in this corner, we have the person who helped bring down HP's stock by more than 50% and missed earnings targets. In the other corner, we have the economic policy that turned $250 billion budget surpluses under Clinton into $300 billion budget deficit in just two years!

Sounds like a perfect match.

Re:Best of luck!

[jollyreaper]

I hope she brings Fox the same integrity and good business sense that she brought to HP. So now I'll need a 500mb driver every time I tune in to Fox? Just another reason not to.

Re:Best of luck!

[WindowlessView]

And Lucent. Let's never forget the fine job she did there.

It's an astounding accomplishment to drive two of the world's premier engineering organizations into the ground within a decade. Truly Fox worthy.

One organization's rubbish...

[mfh]

... is another organization's treasure!

They should have got her for Surreal Life, but I'm sure Fox News will find something stupid for her to say.

Vampire in a company full of ghouls

[pzs]

According to this comment, Carly feasted on the souls of thousands of decent tech workers at HP. Where is she going to find a soul at Fox News?

I have visions of her, the arch-liche and Bill O'Reilly, some kind of undead bear, chucking mega spells at each other across the office.

Peter

Clearly staffing up for battle w/CNBC

[Presence1]

As mentioned in TFA, Fox is planning to start a new business news channel, to compete with CNBC. Interesting that TFA makes no mention of her anticipated role in the new organization.

The man they hired to run the new news channel, Roger Ailes, also helped start CNBC.

The WSJ has an agreement with CNBC to provide content. The WSJ also just got bought by Rupert Murdoch's empire, which also owns Fox. Ailes says that there won't be a conflict.

Ailes also gives a lot more info here in this interview:
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB119160938630350371.html

Should be interesting.

Carly did NOT practically wreck HP first....

[pandrijeczko]

...she got in a lot of good practice at Lucent Technologies also.

[OT] Re:Best of luck!

[hal9000(jr)]

In the other corner, we have the economic policy that turned $250 billion budget surpluses under Clinton into $300 billion budget deficit in just two years!

While I am not a fan of Bush, the deficit slide can't be blamed entirely on Bushes economic plan. The magnitude, sure, but the slide started long before. The forecasters of the OMB were overly optimistic about the dotcom boom and expected it to last forever. When the bust happened, not only did a lot of money dry up, but the expected capital gains taxes forcast dried up too. That and the balanced budget bill lapsed. Congress started spending. So alot of things happened in the span of a few short years some of which can be blamed on President Bush.

BTW, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World by Alan Greenspan has a pretty good overview of that happened in addition to prividing insight into how the guy got to be so smart. It's good reading.

Re:[OT] Re:Best of luck!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're conflating issues.

The claim was the recession that followed the Clinton administration that erased the projected surpluses cannot be blamed upon the Bush administration. The economic decline had already begun during the end of the Clinton administration. Had he remained president for a third term, the same events would have transpired. There were numerous layoffs across the economy, earnings were weak, and everyone except venture capitalists and greedy day trader was projecting the end of Greenspan's "irrational exuberance" with pain. Indeed it would have been even worse had idiots not moved into a housing bubble right afterward, which surprise, surprise, has resulted in a "credit crisis" that is oozing all over the economy.

The U.S. economy has been floating on nonsense for quite a while. It's a sickness that predates the the Bush administration. 'Real wages' have been falling since the '80s.

The Bush administration is retarded, for sure. It ramped up spending and cut taxes, in some perverse amalgam of Keynesian and supply-side theory that we'll call "mortgaging the country's future and then looting the capital, while using our power to reduce the financial liability for our interest groups." The disease that afflicts America is just bigger than any one administration's looting, even if this one is ridiculously egregious.

Re:[OT] Re:Best of luck!

[hondo77]

While I am not a fan of Bush, the deficit slide can't be blamed entirely on Bushes economic plan. The magnitude, sure, but the slide started long before.

Part of leadership is responding to change. How did the Bush administration respond to an impendining budget shortfall? By cutting taxes on the wealthy. How did the Bush administration respond to an actual budget shortfall? By staying the course. How did the Bush administration respond to the increased expenditures required by this unending B.S. war? By staying the course.

I blame the Bush economic "plan" completely for the budget mess. What about Congress? Congress has been Bush's lapdog for the past six years so the blame still rests with him.

Re:-1 Flamebait

[hey!]

It's not incendiary. It's opinionated and sarcastic.

Incendiary would be if it were implied that she and her new employers were going to do something bad to you in the future. Incendiary evokes new negative emotions. Sarcastic just rehashes old ones.

After, this is all just the story of a third rate CEO being hired by a third rate news organization. It's not as if she were being hired by some covert arm of the Republican Party...

Let Fox News have her!

[harshmanrob]

Let's hope she can succeed at running Fox News into the ground. Fortunately, she was unable to do that at HP but if she had stayed any longer, she would have. She can get on the economic segments and tell people how ordering Compaq to fire workers and rehire them at half the pay and no benefits as contractors is a good model for a takeover. And then fired HP employees after the merger, keeping those contractors. She can say how outsourcing is good for the economy as she fired MORE HP workers for those Indian call centers.

Carly, you're a FUCKING BITCH! (and go ahead, moderate me down to a score of zero, I do not care. She is a bitch who destroyed lives and everyone here knows it).

Last Days of HP

[Nom du Keyboard]

I was a contractor at HP for 2-1/2 years that covered the last days of Lew Platt and the first days of Carley. From what I observed, the decline had started, due to the economy weakening during that time, before Carley.

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.

Re:Last Days of HP

[DrVomact]

It is true that there was a period of increasing frugality at HP just before C. Fiorina's advent, but that was truly due to economic conditions, and HP was handling the crisis in its traditional way: instead of laying off employees, HP was saving money in other ways. After all, this was the company that once temporarily cut everyone's salary by about 15% instead of having layoffs. (The reductions were restored when times got better.)

It was only under C.F.'s reign that layoffs were first introduced. However, I do not believe that the reasons for these layoffs were primarily economic—they were moral and political. HP had a well-skilled cadre of professionals with high self esteem; these people thought they mattered. C.F. perceived this as a problem; thus, she proceeded to show the technical staff of HP that they were a disposable commodity by decimating them. I use this word in the old, Roman sense: to instill a proper fear of management, to restore discipline to the level desired by the commanders, you kill a tenth of the men at random. This has a most salutory effect on the survivors.

I worked at HP during this time. Like many, I had been an employee of a company that was bought by HP. At first, the change seemed to be benign—HP was not quite as good a place to work as my old one had been, but it was still pretty decent. That changed with the advent of C.F. It's hard to describe the feeling of helpless despair that became prevalent in my workplace as wave after wave of layoffs swept through it like a series of plagues. The first couple were justified as "getting rid of the deadwood", and you were supposed to feel good that you were not classed among the victims. With successive layoffs, the reasons became progressively thinner, until they achieved total transparency. One layoff was actually announced by management as being "random"; we were supposed think that this meant "fair".

As any student of Josef Stalin's methods knows, the best terror is random terror. If people do not know how to behave to avoid being struck down by the Centurion's truncheon, they become paralyzed by fear. They become docile, easily managed victims that have no self-esteem, make no demands, and are neurotically eager to obey their masters. They become perfect corporate employees.

This was not a phenomenon isolated to HP; HP merely furnishes a particularly egregious example of how the corporations dealt with a perceived threat to their sovereignty that emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century—the rise of a new intelligentsia, composed of technically savvy "knowledge workers" who acquired a sense of empowerment through their understanding of how the new computer and communications technologies worked. This "geek" intelligentsia thought of itself as autonomous, as being outside the old paradigm of boss and peon. But the essence of corporatism is control; consequently, the corporations moved to suppress the intelligentsia using a variety of methods, both subtle and (as in HP's case) not so subtle. Today, their victory seems complete.

Lest I be accused of digression from the topic at hand...I wonder if C.F. had to take a 25% pay cut at her new job, compared to her HP salary, as did I?

Why not?

[ObiWanStevobi]

Fits right in with Oliver North, Mark Fuhrman, Geraldo,etc.

Welcome to the team!

Can they also hire Darl?

[vtldtlm]

Please, please.....

Re:Fox News the News you want to hear.

[WindowlessView]

Except NPR does it on the tax payers dime.

So does Fox News, just with a level of indirection. You think many of their corporate advertisers aren't sucking the public tit dry? That the farm bill doesn't subsidize ADM, or the perverse medicare prescription policy isn't a handout to Big Pharma, etc.?

Roger Ailes? News?

[dpbsmith]

Surely Roger Ailes was the head propagandist for Richard Nixon's campaign? The one that designed the non-issues-oriented feel-good ads? The one that combatted Nixon's reputation for being an geeky, aloof guy by putting him into controlled situations where he appeared to be surrounded by ordinary citizens asking "spontaneous," scripted, softball questions?

Re:Fox News the News you want to hear.

[Wildclaw]

Except that Fox News isn't a news channel. Telling the truth, however biased, should be a requirement to be called a news channel. And Fox News have openly admitted that they have no intention of telling the truth.

They are a propaganda/entertainment channel, no more, no less.

Re:Fox News the News you want to hear.

[Entropius]

NPR isn't as turbo-liberal as you might believe.

Sure, some stations carry blatantly left-wing programs like "Alternative Radio". But nearly every station carries "Marketplace", a financial news show that takes as an axiom "an unfettered free market is ultimately a public good". That's a center-right position. The news shows (All Things Considered, Morning Edition) tend to be fairly middle-of-the-road, since they mostly just give the news without a whole lot of spin. The few "opinion" segments, by people like Daniel Schorr, tend to be pretty nonpartisan.

In fairness to Carly, she was correct.

[mosel-saar-ruwer]

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:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=HPQ&t=my&l=off

-versus-

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=A&t=my&l=off

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:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=IBM&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-04
Total Revenue: 96,293,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-05
Total Revenue: 91,134,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-06
Total Revenue: 91,424,000

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=HPQ&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-04
Total Revenue: 79,905,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-05
Total Revenue: 86,696,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-06
Total Revenue: 91,658,000

QED.

Re:In fairness to Carly, she was correct.

[jayslambast]

Vision and execution are two separate things. The idea for the merger has been speculated as being the Compaq CEO's idea (look what he did for Worldcom). So giving her full credit for this one decision may not be completely right. She did a great job selling it to Wall Street and Retirement fund managers. But just because she made one right call, there were 100s of others she missed.

  What really did her in was how she ran things afterwards that was the issue. She set unrealistic goals (saying we were going to grow by 15% when the industry was declining). She said something to the effect if we didn't have the bar set high enough, we never would try to beat it. Her over promising the world to the market setup us up for failure, especially considering if would make it impossible to get a company bonus requirements. As a matter of fact, she would never tell us how we were evaluated so we could try to hit them. This was one of many things she did that effected moral in the rank and file. She would change the company's focus several times just when we were gaining steam. This inconsistent direction alienated us even more, to the point where feedback showed we had little faith in upper management.

    So even though she was a great speaker, it takes more than a few good ideas to make a decent CEO. I would give Hurd the credit for increasing the stock price and Dell dropping the ball for the last 3 or 4 plays over Carly's few decision that remain today. Now if he would stop reducing our benefits in the name of "Matching the industry average", I would be happier.

btw, I would say there are still some excellent engineers left at HP, and they are helping train the next set of them. The group I'm in is still open working together, mentoring, and trying to keep moral up under our current contraints. We may not have the HP way, but looking at the way the industry is, very few companies that are over 30 yrs old have their original cultures left... But it would be nice it if came back again.