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Carly Fiorina Didn't Want To Be Just a Female Boss

October 2006

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Carly Fiorina says she never wanted to be singled out as a woman in senior management and did not intend her new book, Tough Choices, to be a memoir of the challenges she faced as a women climbing the corporate ladder.

But, she said during her Oct. 19 talk at the Graduate School of Business, it was nearly impossible to describe her career without discussing the role gender played. The stories stretch from one of her earliest jobs in sales—when she chose to attend a meeting at a strip club rather than miss out on it altogether—to her most recent management position as CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., when rumors circulated that she traveled with a personal hairstylist and makeup artist.

"We will have really arrived when someone suggests that Donald Trump travels with his own hairdresser," Fiorina joked during her lunchtime speech at the invitation of the MBA Women in Management club. "His hair is a lot more complicated than mine."

If Fiorina does seem to be in touch with a softer side of business, it is not so much due to her sensitivity to women's issues as to a deep appreciation for human nature in general. She said her own love of business had always been rooted in a love of working with different kinds of people, and added that any successful business person had to be a people person first and foremost.

"I think the story of business is the story of people," said Fiorina, who received a BA from Stanford and briefly attended the Stanford Law School before dropping out to work as a secretary, teach English abroad, and later obtain an MBA and enter the business world working in sales at ATT Corp.

"In my experience, it is the people who produce both the products and the profits, and if you don't understand them, you cannot influence them or your company's products and profits."

This appreciation of human nature, she said, meant understanding the fear that left most workers resistant to change, and knowing what sort of incentives would best motivate them to accept the evolution that was essential for businesses to stay competitive.

Recalling her tenure as CEO of computer giant Hewlett-Packard, Fiorina said she arrived on the job in 1999 to find a company so mired in fear that managers were actively resisting the change sweeping the industry. She said that many of them spent more time competing with other department heads within the company than focusing on new products that would win business.

At the time, she said, HP had 87 different business units that operated so autonomously that they all had their own email systems. Not only was cooperation between different divisions difficult, but also no one had an accurate employee headcount.

Although Silicon Valley was enjoying its biggest boom in history, in 1999 HP had missed earnings forecasts for nine straight quarters, while doling out record-high bonuses to its employees, 75 percent of whom were rated "superior" or "excellent."

"It was an iconic company with founders who were larger than life, but it was falling further and further behind," Fiorina said.

Along with cutting some 36,000 jobs and revamping the compensation structure to align it more closely with the company's financial performance, Fiorina spearheaded a massive merger with Compaq Computer Corp. That 2001 deal remains controversial to this day, and the deep divisions it created are often cited as a key reason behind Fiorina's ouster in 2004.

Today, Fiorina avoids commenting on HP's performance or on the recent scandal involving spying on board members and journalists to get to the source of a boardroom leak. But she did say that executives must always be guided by a personal sense of right and wrong, since it is too easy for them to get away with improper conduct.

"There is no substitute for judgment and personal ethics," she said. "Abusive, dishonest people get results in business, and if you tolerate it then you are sending a message that it is okay, as long as you make the numbers."

—Andrea Orr