Image source - SFGate
In 2005, when the Hewlett-Packard board of directors fired Carly Fiorina, the employees in HP’s Boise facility handed out Hostess Ding Dongs to announce, “The witch is dead.” As noted in a February 2008 article in Entrepreneur Magazine, Fiorina’s impact on employee morale at HP was disastrous:
“A survey of 8,000 employees revealed widespread unhappiness about poor communication and poorly implemented decisions. This was a complete reversal of earlier surveys, which found that HP had some of the highest employee satisfaction scores in corporate America (Burrows, 2003; Malone, 2007). Some workers booed the CEO at company meetings. The company electronic bulletin board was shut down after employees used this forum to attack Fiorina.”
It took sixty years to establish and perfect the employee-friendly “HP Way” and less than five years for Carly to bring it down. Founded in 1939, HP was an early pioneer in providing employee benefits like profit sharing, tuition assistance, flex time, and company-paid insurance. The “HP Way”, as outlined in Peter Burrows' book Backfire, was a set of values which “included treating everyone with respect, sound finances, trust in employees, technical excellence, teamwork, thrift, humility, and hard work.
All of this changed after Carly Fiorina took over the helm at HP in 1999. She decided that it was because of the “HP Way” that the company was losing market share to Dell Computers and Sun Microsystems. So she set out to completely reverse the company philosophy. According to Entrepreneur Magazine, “She treated workers who clung to the HP Way as the opposition. Their devotion to the past put the firm at risk. For the company to move forward, those who resisted change would have to be removed."
Major cutbacks started in 2001 beginning with a “voluntary” pay cut of 10%, which appeared to be done in lieu of layoffs. Even though eighty-six percent of the employees agreed to the pay cut, Fiorina followed up with the largest layoffs in Hewlett-Packard’s history, and proceeded to ship thousands of jobs overseas. The employees felt betrayed.
By 2004, the stockholders and a majority of the board also felt betrayed. HP’s stock price had lost half of its value since Fiorina’s arrival, and employee morale was at the lowest point in company history. In February of 2005 Fiorina was fired. In 2008, Infoworld grouped Carly Fiorina with a list of “flops,” calling her the “anti-Steve Jobs” for “reversing the goodwill of American engineers and for alienating existing customers” (Wikipedia).
Today, Carly Fiorina is running for a US Senate seat in California, currently held by Barbara Boxer. Below is a YouTube video, put out by the Boxer campaign, which highlights the myth of Carly Fiorina:
If elected, the California voters should recognize that Carly Fiorina will treat them the same way that she treated the workforce at HP.
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Comments
Everytime I find out something new about Fiorina, it's never to her credit.
Rated.
Carly, a real visionary. Shipping good engineering jobs overseas. Squandering American assets. What a patriot.
It's a curious time. Disaster looms Everywhere.
We're gonna need a bigger boat.
if you only get a choice of two masters, and both are bad, maybe you should stop supporting a system that says "party hack, or wicked witch?"
the usa has been losing market share since the 50's, that's systemic, not wicked witches. unless the system selects in wicked witches a lot, witch is another kind of system failure.
Yes, there was an internal struggle between Fiorina and Walter Hewlett, son of founder William Hewlett, about Fiorina's push to acquire Compac Computers. There was a lot of boardroom drama, including Carly's disapproval of management realignment and leaked boardroom discussions. We will probably never know the full details, but what is known is that Fiorina was eventually fired.
But, she walked away with a $20M severence package. Go figure.
Lezlie
But it's what she did to HP that really ticks me off. A little personal background. Back in the early 80s I was a low-paid University researcher in Scotland. In those days automation of experiments required minicomputers - the "mini" part was something of a misnomer since you needed a furniture dolly to move even a modest one, but they were still far smaller than the massive mainframes. Our departmental mini, a DEC machine, was obsolete and expensive to maintain, so the department announced plans to scrap it. We had a number of machines hooked up to it via proprietary hardware, so we were in a fix. Then my boss went to a trade show and saw the HP85, a little desktop machine that incorporated HPIB (aka GPIB, IEEE-488) interfacing - an industry standard that originated at HP and lets you hook test equipment together, and to computers. Within a few months we had our experimental machinery running happily from this computer, with less unreliable custom parts, and more functionality than before, and I had a new calling as a real-time programmer. A new job interfacing astronomical hardware soon followed. That led to a posting to the UK telescopes in Hawaii, and later my current career in California. All because HP were an innovative engineering-driven company, rather than a bottom-line driven one. When they were the former, they were pretty damn good at the latter aspect anyway. You bought HP equipment when you could afford it or made do with a sour expression with someone else's inferior but cheaper offering.
HP appears to have gotten it back together profit-wise, but employee morale will probably never return to pre-Fiorina levels. Watch this Robert Greenwald video to get an idea of how much overseas outsourcing took place during her reign.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy_GJuGQ1es
I agree with you. It’s a shame that a woman of such drive and ambition could not have been a better role model. There are many talented senior-level women in our corporate offices these days (Carly Fiorina was not one of them). I sincerely hope that these women did not have to “compromise humanity and ethics to make it.”
Thank you for your thoughts.