Business Carley Fiorina Arrived at Hewlett Packard

Business

Carley Fiorina arrived at Hewlett Packard in 1999 after having a successful career at Lucent and AT&T. Even before she moved into the CEO's office, she had several obstacles that she had to overcome. Fiorina took over HP at the height of the tech boom. Making money in technology industry had become a lot harder than it used to be and Fiorina knew that HP had to make some serious changes in order to successful. She had a vision and she wasn't afraid to share it with others. She spearheaded the initiative to acquire Compaq Computer, despite the objections of the son of company co-founder William Hewlett and many other stockholders (Vries, 2005).

From the beginning she had to figure out how to strike a delicate balance between propelling HP's turgid culture out of its declining ways and into the high-speed Net Age while not losing the elements that had made the company an American icon. The goal was to preserve its deep engineering roots and its good, old-fashioned dependability (Burrows, 1999).

There has been a lot of talk surrounding how Fiorina strayed from the traditional HP Way. The old HP was very friendly with open offices, open collars and open lines of communications between management and employees. When the Compaq merger was being debated and shortly after it was approved by just a slight majority of stockholders, Fiorina was seen by many as a disruptive force (Vries, 2005).

There were many members of management that were against the merger. They felt that it would be bad for employees, bad for retailers, bad for consumers and, ultimately, bad for stockholders. Despite these criticisms HP had some pretty good quarters after the merger causing lots of other one-time critics to quiet down a bit. But there was still plenty to criticize about Fiorina's term at HP. In the end the changes that Fiorina made didn't turn out so well for the thousands of Hewlett Packard and Compaq employees that were laid off and the millions of HP stockholders who lost money after her takeover (Vries, 2005).

When you look back at Fiorina's tenure are HP it almost appears as if she was trying to make HP all things to all people. "On the PC side, she tried to compete with Dell's low-cost commodity strategy while on the higher-end she tried to compete with IBM's high-end, high-cost consulting and custom services business" (Vries, 2005). While HP was a contender on both sides of the spectrum, it really wasn't successful at either. It has been suggested that HP should abandon the PC business to focus more on its printer business that was doing well long before Fiorina took over (Vries, 2005).

HP dropped did not do so well in the arena of innovation. Not long after taking charge Fiorina changed HP's slogan to "invent." It was supposed to reflect her continued support for R&D and HP's terrific research staff, but whatever inventions HP came up with simply were not inspiring enough to change the company's fate (Vries, 2005).

When comparing HP's performance in this area to that of Apple, which was also in trouble in the late 90s, one sees a big difference. "Under Steve Jobs' leadership, Apple didn't just invent new computers; it invented a new industry with its iTunes service and iPod digital music player" (Vries, 2005). Under Fiorina's leadership HP tried to follow Dell and Gateway by marketing its own line of TVs and other home entertainment products (Vries, 2005).