Harbus

Issue date: 11/6/06 Section: News

Carly Fiorina, author of Tough Choices: A Memoir.

After being largely removed from the public eye since her dismissal from HP, Carly Fiorina resurfaces at Harvard to discuss lessons learned along her rise as one of the most influential women in business.

"A leader's most fundamental job is to sense danger and opportunity ahead of others and to act on that knowledge," Carly Fiorina said, in her first visit back to the Harvard campus since the HP-Compaq merger was announced in 2002. The former CEO of Hewlett Packard addressed a packed crowd at the Kennedy School of Government on October 17, in a forum organized jointly by KSG and HBS' Women's Student Association. Largely removed from the public eye since her dismissal from HP by the HP board in 2005, she has recently resurfaced in the media with the launch of her memoir, Tough Choices: A Memoir. Her speech centered on the topics addressed in her book around her rise to the top at AT&T, Lucent and HP as well as her subsequent high profile dismissal.

After graduating from Stanford with a double degree in medieval history and philosophy, Fiorina continued to the UCLA School of Law but dropped out after a semester, in her words, "the first real adult decision I made in my life". She started her career at the real estate firm Marcus & Millichap as a secretary "in order to pay the rent" but was promoted after six months when her employers recognized her potential. The promotion had a profound effect on her-not only did she realize her love for business, but she also recognized that one of the most important acts as a leader is to see the potential in other people and to help nurture that potential.

Fiorina went on to become a salesperson at AT&T, where she battled gender stereotypes by showing her ability to behave like the boys. In a story which drew much laughter from the audience, she described how she insisted on attending a client meeting with her male colleague despite the fact that it was to be held in a strip club. At the end of meeting, the males were more uncomfortable than she was but they realized that she was not to be intimidated. She went on to be a VP at AT&T before joining Lucent as the EVP of corporate operations when it was spun out of AT&T, and later became its President of the consumer products division. In 1999, HP appointed her CEO.

As might be expected, Fiorina defended her record at HP, particularly her changes to performance measurement and organizational structure as well as her efforts to redirect the company to focus on innovation. After missing nine quarters of earnings expectations during the dot-com era, she felt that she needed to transform an underperforming bureaucracy into a performance-focused meritocracy. She was shocked for instance, to learn that employees had been receiving record bonuses despite the dismal results. "The internal measurement system had nothing to do with comparative reality," she said. Moreover, HP was run with "a thousand tribes", each with their own organization, and little alignment with the customers. However, she did recognize that changes to measurement, reward and organizational structure would be deeply emotional for most people. Initial resistance to what was deemed to be contrary to the "HP Way" was fierce but Fiorina pointed out to employees that the label had started to obscure reality, and that the underlying philosophy behind HP was innovation. Fiorina, surprisingly, did not speak much about the decision to merge HP with Compaq, despite it being a cornerstone of her transformational strategy for HP.

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