Carly Fiorina’s career has followed an uncannily cinematic arc.
A restless law school dropout becomes a master sales rep for Ma Bell and then rises higher in business than any other woman, running Hewlett-Packard Co. for six years. She wrestles that stodgy Silicon Valley institution into the Internet age, needing every ounce of her charm to win a huge merger contest.
But her style inflames critics. After her financial results fall short, she is unceremoniously canned.
So if this were a movie, what would happen next?
That’s right: Get ready for Fiorina’s comeback.
In her memoir emerging this week, “Tough Choices,” Fiorina will contend that she was unfairly scrutinized as a woman in business and unproductively opposed by people who feared the big changes she had to make at HP.
“It’s a book about what’s required of change agents,” she told a women-in-business conference recently at Babson College outside Boston. “The agents of change are always resisted. … Some people fear the unknown, whatever it may be, even more than they fear the troublesome but known present.”
On one level, the memoir seems perfectly timed as HP twists amid its current corporate spying scandal, confirming the dysfunctional insecurity of the board that fired Fiorina.
But the book also provides Fiorina a platform to reinvent herself for whatever comes next.
She has the freedom of choice that comes from being extremely wealthy. Besides her $21 million severance pay, she began 2006 with 850,000 HP shares – a stake that size is worth $31 million now.
Fiorina, 52, told the Babson audience she has maintained her interest in global development issues. Her name emerged last year as a candidate for World Bank president.
Fiorina has advised President Bush and California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on tech policy, but she traditionally dismissed questions of her own interest in politics by saying she was focused on running HP.
Should she explore that route now, she might find she still has celebrity cachet.
Stephen Mader, vice chairman of Christian &Timbers, the headhunting firm that brought Fiorina from AT&T Corp. spinoff Lucent Technologies Inc. to HP in 1999, says the ignominious end to her HP stint will not necessarily keep her from becoming a CEO again.
However, Fiorina’s next employer would be wise to study the strengths and weaknesses she showed at HP.
Fiorina wins praise for defining a new vision for a slow-moving bureaucracy that had essentially missed the Internet revolution. Before Fiorina, HP had a murky strategy for linking its computer, server and printer businesses. She recast HP as an IBM-like strategic partner for customers trying to take advantage of the always-on aspects of the Web era.
But generally she is considered to have fallen short on day-to-day operational matters – the things that prompt raves for her successor, Mark Hurd.
Among the most famous letdowns: Fiorina told Wall Street HP could produce 15 percent revenue growth in 2001. It fell 7 percent. In August 2004, when sales fell way short of forecasts, Fiorina blamed embarrassing problems with an internal computer system and surprisingly weak customer demand, then fired three top executives.
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