HP forces out most powerful female CEO

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » February 9, 2005, 8:13 pm

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Hewlett-Packard Co. Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina, one of the most powerful women in corporate America, is leaving the troubled computer maker after being forced out by the company's board.

Shares of HP (Research) jumped 6.9 percent in heavy trading on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday on the news. But at one point, the stock was up as much as 10.5 percent.

"The stock is up a bit on the fact that nobody liked Carly's leadership all that much," said Robert Cihra, an analyst with Fulcrum Global Partners. "The Street had lost all faith in her and the market's hope is that anyone will be better."

Fiorina, the only female CEO at a company in the Dow Jones industrial average, had been with HP since 1999. But the company's controversial deal to buy Compaq in the spring of 2002 -- after a bruising proxy fight led by one of the Hewlett family heirs -- has not produced the shareholder returns or profits she had promised.

Hit the road bitch!

Ahhh, back to an old, white, balding guy again. Whew!
God bless America!

Midnyte_Ragebringer · February 10, 2005, 1:04 am

What a biased piece of shit article that is. It's this shit that really pisses me off about the media. Instead of writing about what happened in a professional manner, they have to portray it as a gender thing. Fucking assholes.

http://stocks.usatoday.com/custom/usato ... r&freq=3mo

Maybe that's the reason why she got fired. Maybe that's the reason many weren't too happy with her performance. /grrrr

edit: in case your are a tad slow, look at the chart showing the last 5 years.

Tenuvil · Post by **Tenuvil** » February 10, 2005, 1:23 am

Last Sunday, the business columnist of the Houston Chronicle ran an article on HP and Fiorina. It was illuminating to see that analysts valued the printer segment of HP ALONE at more per share than the entire company.

Carly took HP down as a matter of pride. What happens now? The PC business gets sold to Dell or Lenovo and HP consolidates around the profitable printer business.

nobody · Post by **nobody** » February 10, 2005, 2:17 am

my gut tells me akaran is responsible.

Toshira · Post by **Toshira** » February 10, 2005, 3:06 am

Yes. Very biased. Note the part where it says she was forced out because she was a woman.

Do you hate the media because it's an "in" thing to do, or because it's hard for you to read?

Deward · Post by **Deward** » February 10, 2005, 11:55 am

Carly had a target on her as soon as she made that stupid ass mistake of buying Compaq for 24 billion. I don't know of anyone in the industry who would be that stupid to pay that much for a company that was likely to be bankrupt in a year or two. She barely got the shareholders to approve the purchase which should have been a sign right there.

Fash · Post by **Fash** » February 10, 2005, 12:00 pm

Good riddance then... Compaq was teh fucking worst.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » February 10, 2005, 12:11 pm

Midnyte_Ragebringer wrote:What a biased piece of shit article that is. It's this shit that really pisses me off about the media. Instead of writing about what happened in a professional manner, they have to portray it as a gender thing. Fucking assholes.

get a cup of coffee and read it again.

the analyst said that people didnt liek her leadership style. that has nothing to do with gender.

Either on your computer screen there is a secret decoder and you can read the true meanings of things that the rest of us can't or i'm missing something.

You did however demonstrate an excellent example of what 'bias' in fact is. Irrespective of facts, you pushed a conclusion that you already held and attempted to support it with things that had no relationship to that conclusion whatsoever.

Kargyle · Post by **Kargyle** » February 10, 2005, 12:23 pm

I work for HP and Compaq before that, and believe me, Carly being fired has nothing to do with her being a woman, and more with her running the company into the ground. The business model she wanted to use would have turned HP into a computer compnay that didn't actually make computers anymore. It would, in essence, have been a marketing company. Putting the HP name and reputation on whatever piece of crap another company made for us. The only thing Carly did right was protect the PC part of the business from being spun off by combining it with the printer division.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » February 10, 2005, 12:49 pm

This stupid bitch should have been axed YEARS ago. She was CFO during the years when Lucent was debt financing at rates Mafia loansharks would have called extortion. Her reward for losing BILLIONS of dollars for hundreds of thousands of investors? A CEO gig at HP. Those fucks got exactly what they deserved.

I may be personally biased, as her financial irresponsibility cost me personally over $30K in options and turned the $50K I'd sunk into the employee stock purchase plan into less than $8,000. THANKS CARLY!

Midnyte_Ragebringer · February 10, 2005, 12:49 pm

Voronwë wrote:
Midnyte_Ragebringer wrote:What a biased piece of shit article that is. It's this shit that really pisses me off about the media. Instead of writing about what happened in a professional manner, they have to portray it as a gender thing. Fucking assholes.

get a cup of coffee and read it again.

the analyst said that people didnt liek her leadership style. that has nothing to do with gender.

Either on your computer screen there is a secret decoder and you can read the true meanings of things that the rest of us can't or i'm missing something.

You did however demonstrate an excellent example of what 'bias' in fact is. Irrespective of facts, you pushed a conclusion that you already held and attempted to support it with things that had no relationship to that conclusion whatsoever.

Voro,

No need to read it again. It's all in the "didn't like her leadership style". Name the last time a big CEO got canned without them mentioning financial professional reasons for their outsting. Come on man.

miir · Post by **miir** » February 10, 2005, 1:06 pm

If you knew anything about the HP situation (I'll assume you don't) and the shithole she was running the company into, you would have a clue as to why she was canned. A 3rd party analyst stating "nobody liked Carly's leadership all that much" was being incredibly kind.
I did work for HP last year and the consensus from techs to VPs was that Fiorina was running the company into the ground and she should have been turfed long ago.

It seems like the title of Winnow's post and his comments directly influenced how you interpreted the article. There was no subliminal messages in the article suggesting that she was 'let go' because of her gender.

You're always the first one to cry about 'negativity' in the media. Perhaps your poor comprehension and interpretation skills are the real problem.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » February 10, 2005, 1:07 pm

battery is dead in my secret decoder ring, so i am simply left to assume that "leadership style" means "leadership style".

from my limited business experience, 'leadership style' is something that has gotten the director of my department run out of the building.

basically SHE** was fired because she did a terrible job. But calling that "leadership style" is a more courteous way of expressing that. Obviously in the 2 previous posts on this thread guys have provided real concrete examples of decisions that she has made that were terrible for the companies under her leadership.

If you are an executive, your "leadership style" is integral to the success or failure of your job.

Akaran_D · Post by **Akaran_D** » February 10, 2005, 1:07 pm

/whistles innocently
I love women with power, but hate HP in general..

hard choice on this one.

Lynks · Post by **Lynks** » February 10, 2005, 1:09 pm

In sports, many CEOs, GMs, and managers have been fired due to poor "leadership styles". I don't see how this is any different.

Midnyte_Ragebringer · February 10, 2005, 1:18 pm

It's quite possible I am overreacting. I hope I am.

miir · Post by **miir** » February 10, 2005, 1:29 pm

It's quite possible that you are an idiot. I hope you are.

Fash · Post by **Fash** » February 10, 2005, 1:30 pm

they hired her, a woman, as ceo, and kept her for 3+ years...

she sucked, she's fired, who's next.

Marbus · Post by **Marbus** » February 10, 2005, 2:18 pm

Look I don't care who she was or what gender, she has fucked up HP and ran it into the shithole with HER MANAGEMENT STYLE. I have a lot of friend who work at HP out in the field and she has been screwing things up for years. She would come up with these stupid ideas that made things even worse... that IS management style. Glad she is gone, glad for my friends and glad that maybe in the next couple of years they can get things back together before it's all thrown to the wind. The sad part is that some parts are screwd for good

Marb

Marbus · Post by **Marbus** » February 10, 2005, 2:22 pm

Quote from the article Midnyte quoted just to prove my point that she sucked... who would want to work for someone like this? (thanks Mid)

But, observers say, HP lost more than expenses and thousands of employees during the process. Fiorina erased the employee-focused culture once known as the "HP way," focused single-mindedly on quarterly profits, and alienated employees. That, business experts say, ultimately may be her lasting legacy.

"This was a company that was the essential model of innovation, a great model of leadership style. Everyone used this as a model for the integrity of the engineers," said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, associate dean of the Yale School of Management. "No CEO uses HP as a model for anything now."

Marb

masteen · Post by **masteen** » February 10, 2005, 3:12 pm

You know that focus on quarterly profits while blithely ignoring the long run repercussions is in a nutshell what is wrong with corporate America. The reason we're getting creamed by Japanses and Chinese businesses is because these folks have 5 and 10 year PLANS. Pretty much EVERY decision made at the top levels in a US corporation is reactionary.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » February 10, 2005, 4:23 pm

so much money is made in the stock market speculating on short term performance, that shareholders have power disproportionate to what is in the best interest of corporations currently. in my totally non-expert opinion.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » February 10, 2005, 5:17 pm

Your non-expert opinion is backed up by my 5 years empirical observation working for our corporate overlords.

For example, we had a great partnership going w/ Cisco to provide routers for our network customers. In their lust for short term profit, they fucked up a 5 year partnership to hop in bed w/ the #2 company (Bay), who was in turn bought up by Lucent's main competitor, Nortel. Hilarity ensues as we're left scrambling for routing solutions, as Cisco wouldn't deal with us anymore.

Chidoro · Post by **Chidoro** » February 10, 2005, 5:33 pm

The only sure thing these days seems to be foreign currency.

Yeah, Lucent was a brilliant flash. I'm pretty sure firefly asses have burned out more quickly than their flame

Chmee · Post by **Chmee** » February 10, 2005, 10:53 pm

masteen wrote:You know that focus on quarterly profits while blithely ignoring the long run repercussions is in a nutshell what is wrong with corporate America. The reason we're getting creamed by Japanses and Chinese businesses is because these folks have 5 and 10 year PLANS. Pretty much EVERY decision made at the top levels in a US corporation is reactionary.

Those 5 year plans did wonders for the Soviet Union.

Don Boudreaux recently had a post on Cafe Hayek briefly addressing this type of accusation.

http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2005 ... g_sho.html

Sacrificing Short-Term Profit for Long-Run Gain

Corporate managers are widely believed to work under intense pressure to maximize quarterly profits at the expense of long-term gains. I encounter this claim at least once a day, and oftentimes more than once.

Here’s just one example, from a 1999 paper that I found in my files. ("Organizational Downsizing: An Introduction," by Jack Rabin, a Professor of Public Policy at Penn State - Harrisburg.)

Financial markets put pressure on corporate managers to focus too much on quarterly profits and too little on patient investment for the long haul.
Similarly, the AFL-CIO believes that corporations are driven to focus on the short-run. So, too, does Noam Chomsky. And in his book, Exporting America, Lou Dobbs repeats this claim ad nauseam.

This popular belief that corporate managers are driven above all to maximize short-term profits came to mind today as I read this account of the new Airbus 380.

I have no opinions on the merits of this new jumbo-est of jets – I haven’t yet flown in one. And that’s my point. This jet won’t even begin to carry commercial passengers or freight until sometime next year. Yet already several companies have placed orders for the $250 million jet, including Virgin Airlines, UPS, and Federal Express.

Federal Express, for example, won’t get its first 380 until 2008 – yet it has already placed orders for ten of them.

I don’t know the dollar amount of FedEx’s down payment for its order of ten 380s, but I’m certain that it’s in the millions of dollars (and, likely, in the hundreds of millions of dollars). A company obsessed with maximizing quarterly profits would not spend millions of dollars today for a benefit that won’t begin paying off until several years down the road.

A simple but important point.

Yes, companies do focus on quarterly profits. That can be an important arbiter of how well the company is doing. But companies that don't also keep the long term in mind aren't that likely to last that long so there is plenty of incentive to keep an eye on the long term as well.

masteen · Post by **masteen** » February 11, 2005, 12:56 pm

The only reason those companies aren't ordering those jets only when they need them is because of the unavoidable production lag. If it wasn't for that, I GUARANTEE you that all these companies would order planes only when the old ones fucking crashed.

Chmee · Post by **Chmee** » February 11, 2005, 8:07 pm

masteen wrote:The only reason those companies aren't ordering those jets only when they need them is because of the unavoidable production lag. If it wasn't for that, I GUARANTEE you that all these companies would order planes only when the old ones fucking crashed.

Yes, having your planes crash is wonderful for shareholder confidence. Sorry, I still don't buy your assertion. Companies look to the short and long term if they want to continue making money.

Kargyle · Post by **Kargyle** » February 11, 2005, 9:48 pm

If they want to continue to make money yes. But these days too many CEO's are just looking to bolster short term profits and then take their golden parachute when the shit hits the fan.

Take Carly for example, she got fired because she couldn't manage a Mc'Donalds, much less a company the size of HP, and yet she still skated out of HP with 20 million in her pocket. So what is her motivation to care about long term profit, when you are looking at the big ass golden parachute it is hard to give a shit about the people left at the company when you are done wrecking it.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » February 11, 2005, 9:57 pm

Kargyle wrote:So what is her motivation to care about long term profit, when you are looking at the big ass golden parachute it is hard to give a shit about the people left at the company when you are done wrecking it.

Peter Gibbons: It's a problem of motivation, all right? Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation? And here's another thing, I have eight different bosses right now.

Bob Porter: Eight?

Peter Gibbons: Eight, Bob. So that means when I make a mistake, I have eight different people coming by to tell me about it. That's my only real motivation is not to be hassled, that, and the fear of losing my job. But you know, Bob, that will only make someone work just hard enough not to get fired.

Tenuvil · Post by **Tenuvil** » February 11, 2005, 11:38 pm

masteen wrote:You know that focus on quarterly profits while blithely ignoring the long run repercussions is in a nutshell what is wrong with corporate America. The reason we're getting creamed by Japanses and Chinese businesses is because these folks have 5 and 10 year PLANS. Pretty much EVERY decision made at the top levels in a US corporation is reactionary.

Kargyle wrote:If they want to continue to make money yes. But these days too many CEO's are just looking to bolster short term profits and then take their golden parachute when the shit hits the fan.

Thank you both for stating the obvious, something I've been pissed about ever since I graduated from b-school in the early 90s. EVERY US public corporation manages earnings quarter to quarter and focuses on short term results rather than the long term, a strategy that is damning in the end (see: Enron, Worldcom, Global Crossing)