Carly Fiorina was a decisive, dynamic, charismatic CEO at Hewlett Packard when she ran the high-tech behemoth from 1999-2005.

She also happened to be an abysmal chief executive who badly tarnished the company's name and bottom line.

And yet Fiorina repeatedly invokes her strengths as a business leader as a cornerstone of her candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. "I come from a world outside of politics, where track records and accomplishments count," she said earlier this year.

What happened when she was HP CEO tells a far different story. I had a front-row press seat in the early 2000s, covering the corporate soap opera over Fiorina's bid to merge HP with Compaq Computer in a $24 billion deal. By the time Fiorina was shown the door, there had been 30,000 layoffs and a brutal shareholder showdown over Compaq that fractured its executive ranks. not to mention a severely damaged company. HP's once-sterling image was in tatters.

Fiorina ran a company all right — into the ground.

When her turbulent five-year reign was over, HP was looked upon with remorse — far from the venerated institution whose many admirers once included Steve Jobs.

"Her leadership of HP was a total disaster," says Mike Beer, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School. "She failed on delivering shareholder value and in setting a long-term, sustainable course for the company.

"HP was a highly admired company for decades, and she destroyed its intangible assets and culture within a year," Beer says.

With her steely gaze, laser-like intensity and unbowed self-belief, Fiorina was a compelling interview subject the handful of times we talked. Despite withering criticism and internal corporate strife — a survey of 3,358 HP employees found that 64% "don't see the benefits" of buying Compaq — she never wavered. At one particularly grim point, when it appeared the end was near for her as CEO, an unrepentant Fiorina told me she wouldn't have changed a thing.

Admirable, even if her decision to stitch Compaq to HP, like some Frankenstein monster, proved to be deeply flawed. Her lavish "golden parachute" of $21 million in cash, plus stock and pension benefits worth another $19 million, only deepened the animus among HP employees.

There is no disputing Fiorina's gifts as a bold public speaker with a senatorial air. In interviews, she was gracious and keenly on message. Indeed, her mastery of marketing helped land her the top job at HP and is serving her well in a crowded Republican field.

But Fiorina — a natural politician with a gift for public speaking, endless charm and the ability to absorb complex issues instantly — will have a devil of a time hawking her narrative as HP CEO.

"She's a really good salesperson, but it will be hard for Carly to sell this," says Bloomberg News reporter Peter Burrows, author of Backfire: Carly Fiorina's High-Stakes Battle for the Soul of Hewlett-Packard. "She double-downed in the wrong direction" on Compaq.

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http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/colum...toric/31942039/


This is what I've thought all along, "she's a really good salesperson" but will have an impossible task righting the wrongs of this Country. TM

Here's the latest executive to call Carly Fiorina's business record 'disastrous'

Carly Fiorina may come from the executive suite, but that hasn’t stopped other executives from slamming her record.

The latest critique comes from Steven Rattner, a former Wall Street banker and private equity executive. Rattner, in an opinion piece in the New York Times on Saturday, called Fiorina’s time as the CEO of HP “short and disastrous.” Rattner said HP’s acquisition of Compaq, pushed through by Fiorina, caused an amount of divisiveness at the company that Rattner says he never saw in his 33-year career on Wall Street. He said that while Fiorina did serve during a tough period for tech stocks, HP’s shares did worse than rivals. And Rattner said Fiorina has correctly been named to a number of lists of worst executives of all time.

Rattner says it is perhaps unfair to criticize Fiorina for the 30,000 layoffs that happened at HP under her watch. Again, the tech sector was going through a tough time. But Rattner says voters should note that during the time of the layoffs, again a difficult time for tech and HP, Fiorina took home $100 million in compensation, and she pushed for HP to acquire five private jets.

Rattner says less attention has been paid to Fiorina’s time at Lucent, the job she had before going to HP. Fiorina was never the boss at Lucent, but Rattner says she oversaw the use of a number of aggressive sales tactics to boost revenue. Rattner says shortly after Fiorina left Lucent, the company “veered off a cliff.”

Rattner said strikingly few former colleagues have come to Fiorina’s success. And he says her own defense of comparing herself to other business leaders who were fired, like Steve Jobs and Oprah Winfrey, is silly. They rebounded to remarkable business success. Fiorina never did.

Rattner, to be sure, has had his own business troubles. In 2010, the former investment banker and private equity executive agreed to pay $6.2 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges that his firm used a consultant who essentially paid kickbacks to win business from a New York State pension fund. A number of other private equity firms were investigated as well, and Rattner did not admit or deny the allegations. What’s more, Rattner is not without his bias. He is a long-time democratic donor, and was recruited by the Obama administration to help it with GM and the other car companies in the wake of the bailouts.

http://fortune.com/2015/09/26/carly-fiorina-steven-rattner/