HP's Fiorina Speaks at HBS
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| Fiorina Photo courtesy of Hewlett-Packard |
In the 1970s, after graduating from Stanford with a concentration in medieval history and philosophy, something happened to Carly Fiorina on her way to a successful legal career. “I hated law school, and I quit,” she confessed to an audience of HBS students in Burden Auditorium last March. Fiorina then took a job as a secretary, and spent her days banging away at a typewriter. It was the pre-computer era, the company where she worked was Hewlett Packard (HP), and Fiorina was not particularly impressed: She soon left HP for other adventures in underemployment at home and abroad, before eventually earning an MBA at the University of Maryland.
In 1999, after almost twenty years in the executive ranks at AT&T and Lucent, the one-time HP secretary returned to her former employer as its CEO. A $72 billion operation, with 140,000 employees in 160 countries, HP is one of the world’s leaders in the areas of personal computing, enterprise systems, imaging and printing, and IT services. It was, however, suffering from bloat and inefficiency when Fiorina was called in to streamline the company and get back to its innovative and storied roots as Silicon Valley’s quintessential “garage to riches” enterprise. Perhaps her biggest move has been HP’s 2002 merger with Compaq, the largest such marriage in high-tech history. Acknowledging the nay-saying and controversy that accompanied the deal, Fiorina noted, “We just announced the most profitable quarter the company has had in ten quarters, the most profitable since we launched the merger.”
As a high-profile female executive, Fiorina is no stranger to scrutiny and second-guessing; she told her audience, “You can’t manage your business by conventional wisdom, headlines, or the stock market. You manage by business fundamentals and a very strong internal compass. Business is about more than facts and figures. It’s about real emotion and how people react to emotion, and that has to be understood and factored in by a leader, just as much as income statements and balance sheets.”
