Spinning Carly
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Carly Fiorina is spinning so fast she may well achieve escape velocity.
Having spent both my technical and marketing careers in and around Hewlett
Packard ( do you remember RTE and MPE ) I have better than average insights into
the organization, and many friends and acquaintances at many levels of the HP
empire. So when Carly started stumping her new book, not only was her
message out of kilter with my own observations, it generated loud and disgusted
shouting by HP employees — even those who didn’t lose their jobs.
Then came the 60 Minutes interview last Sunday, after which these same
employees erupted in a way heretofore known only to Vesuvius.
There are not enough available electrons to dissect for you all of Carly’s
spin, but allow a few observations of spin filtered through inside observations:
Change agent: Carly contends that the change agent (ie., Carly
in HP) always takes the arrows. This clearly isn’t true as a number of
executive change agents — like Lou Gerstner at IBM — effected change without
getting fired. And Lou had a much more difficult job as the IBM corporate
culture was defective, where as HP’s corporate culture was sluggish but
reliable.
Herein lies the biggest problem with Carly’s self deception. People
will accept cultural changes only when they are involved and see the benefit.
People within HP who came before, and survived after Carly’s reign note that she
disrupted the HP culture, and did not even try to change it through
collaboration and acceptance — a strategic mistake given the value, history, and
love of the HP Way.
One story is illuminating. HP has offices on the Microsoft campus,
where the two companies collaborate on products. One HP staffer noted that
when Lou Platt, Carly’s predecessor, visited Microsoft, you heard about it the
next day after Lou had quietly come and gone. When Carly showed up, it was
broadcast in advance of her multi-limo cavalcade arriving in rock star fashion.
Her visits dominated the time and attention of all resident HP employees.
Thus, Carly was more than out of sync with the HP culture … she ignored and
affronted those who held the culture most deeply. This explains why
recordings of "ding dong the witch is dead" were playing on PCs in HP offices
the day her termination was announced.
Define success: Carly is now taking credit for HP’s recent stock
price recover, which sank 56% on her watch ( granted, she came about two years
before the dot-bomb era, so not all of that loss can be laid at her pedicured
feet ). "HP is now a leader, not a laggard," she announced. "We made the
necessary changes." Yet Carly does not explain why the strategy she put into
place succeeded after her departure and not during her tenure. Some HP
employees I have swapped email with claim that the mere lifting of her
omniscient persona gave employees hope once again, and they began producing more
from relief than from her strategy.
That aside, many people have noted that "strategy is easy, execution is
hard." Being a strategist I know this to be half correct —
execution is indeed hard. In Carly we saw not only an inattention to
execution, we saw bad strategy froze execution. Where as Lou Gerstner took
a highly centralized IBM and decentralized each component, allowing each to be a
more self managing profit center, Carly attempted to destroy HP’s high
decentralized organization, which had allowed amazing things — like their
highly profitable printer division — to flourish. Indeed, most every
board member and most every industry analyst were saying so shortly before and
after her departure. The only who apparently doesn’t believe this is
Carly.
Carly is attempting to redefine success away from the two real measures of
employee involvement and shareholder value, the two fronts on which she failed
miserably.
Men did her in: The 60 Minutes interviews of HP spymaster
Patricia Dunn and Carly amplified Fiorina’s claim that men had ganged up on her
because she is (allegedly) a woman. Her lightly veiled contention is that
it is still a man’s world into which no woman executive can survive.
What a change a few years makes. One HP employee I received a note from
reported that when Carly first spoke to the HP masses, she proclaimed "There is
no glass ceiling". Now, after being canned for canning HP’s share price,
she believes the good-old-boy network thrives. Carly cannot have it both
ways. And she might get some pushback from eBay founder and CEO Meg
Whitman, who created a corporate culture and continues to nurture it.
Of all the jetsam I’ve received over the last few days, nothing sums up
Carly’s spinning better that what one fellow wrote about the 60 Minutes
interview:
Watching with my wife, who was an HP employee during that time, was fun … she usually doesn’t talk back to the TV as much as she did tonight!
I guess Carly will just have to wipe away those tears with her $40,000,000
parachute. Let us just pray that the rumors that she was fielded as a
possible candidate for World Bank president are untrue, otherwise we might kiss
the world economy goodbye.
