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Trouble arrives [from the front page]

As the head of an $80 billion company, [Carly Fiorina] also has been held up as an icon to women in business - a label she has refused to embrace. In interviews, she has always said that leadership skills are gender neutral, and asked to be judged on her performance, not her sex.

Yet she became front-page news - and a frequent cover story for business magazines - not so much because people cared about server- industry market shares, but because she epitomized an alluring, controversial new breed of chief executive officers who combine grand visions with charismatic but self-centered and demanding styles.

A classic situation of directors voting for style over substance, as in some ways Britain did in 1992 with Tony Blair and his vague promises and charisma, over the staid John Major.

Fiorina herself was determined to correct the impression and:

… aggressively reorganized H-P's business units in her first year, then dismantled some of those changes when they created unexpected snags. She was forced to lay off 6,000 employees, about 7% of the work force, in 2001, as the economy stalled. It was H-P's largest layoff ever and deeply jolted morale.

Her first major move, according to a Feb. 2001 article, was to restructure:

Until last year, HP was a collection of 83 independently run units, each focused on a product such as scanners or security software. Fiorina has collapsed those into four sprawling organizations.

Without going into detail, the theory was that:

The new structure [would] boost collaboration, giving sales and marketing execs a direct pipeline to engineers, so products are developed from the ground up to solve customer problems.

She also tried to boost creativity across the company, commendable but unfortunately, in doing so, she also made some errors:

1] With her "back end, front end" structure, accounting procedures became transparent but it also made it impossible to pinpoint who was productive and who wasn't. A business school management idea was applied to a major company with disastrous results in accountability;

2] By reducing divisions of a company this size to four streams, she was better able to maintain personal control and fell into the classic error of briefing her closest aides but leaving the lower echelons floating in a very uncertain new management structure during a period of deep unease for the company;

3] As things went wrong for her:

… she became more brittle in confrontational settings, seldom giving ground, staying focused on facts, but doing little to warm her audiences.

Who was at fault?

Remember that HP was a culture thick company and as such, any changes had to be handled with compassion and tact. Not many businesswomen at that time nor even today, at that level, are noted for the quality of compassion or tact.

While it's tempting to lay the blame at her door, the directors plus the family itself must shoulder a large portion for their role in promoting a woman who was wholly wrong for a company with this sort of corporate culture.

Psychologist Michael Maccoby has called such people as Fiorina "productive narcissists", arguing that in the right settings, they can accomplish great things. In the wrong environments, he wrote, such leaders fail.

To put it in layman's terms, she was:

1] full of her own abilities to solve every problem personally and expected personnel to fall into line with her ideas;

2] full of new notions and her own terminology for it which required "selling" to the personnel but she had not the gift to do that;

3] possessed of the knack of being abrasive and getting people's backs up, rather than winning their trust and loyalty;

4] trying to cajole and bully a major company with an established culture without first embracing that culture and trying to change it from within, relying on her love of the company ethos to carry her through.

In other words, she was a poor manager, as her successor also turned out to be. The crunch came with the Compaq merger and the legal battle thereby unleashed:

Halley Suitt, writer of “How To Become An Alpha Male In 18 Easy Lessons” and successful CEO of a start-up company

The end

Originally a $25.3 billion deal, announced just after Labor Day, the merger was so hated that investors erased 19%, or nearly $5 billion, of H-P market capitalization within one day of its announcement.

Walter Hewlett, the son of one of the co-founders of the Silicon Valley giant and a board member, watched in horror as H-P's stock declined even further and he decided to act. He [let] the CEO know that he would vote against H-P's planned merger with Compaq Computer Corp.

She ended up winning the proxy wars and the merger went through - it had to, on pain of huge penalty clauses - and now her neck was riding on her making a go of the deal. Bad luck in the market generally did not help her cause. As one report at the time stated:

With the merger falling short of expectations, Ms. Fiorina has repeatedly been on the defensive. Over time, that has grated on some H-P managers, causing them to jump ship and join competitors. Ms. Fiorina has said that she doesn't believe H-P has lost many valuable executives in the process.

Her own attitude to the personnel of the company couldn't be clearer than in this last statement. What brought her to her final undoing though was trying to defend the indefensible. The stark statistics said that:

1] in Lew Platt's seven year stint, sales had gone up 293%;

2] since Carly Fiorina's arrival, stock had dropped by 53%

Different decades, different measures, stocks and sales but still - it was enough to seal her doom. By this stage, it was all rearguard action to preerve her position. In an interview, she answered the charge in 2] above this way:

Now we're in a period where we've integrated the company and over the course of the last two and a half years have produced two billion more in revenue than analysts predicted. But it hasn't been consistent performance quarter over quarter. So now we have to execute.

She was now being consistently ravaged on two counts - the figures and her attitude to staff. First the figures:

After weeks of promising that HP would meet its quarterly numbers, Fiorina got grim news from the finance department. While sales growth beat expectations, profits had fallen $230 million short. The culprit, in large part, was Fiorina's aggressive management makeover. With HP's 88,000 staffers adjusting to the biggest reorganization in the company's history, expenses had risen out of control. And since new computer systems to track the changes weren't yet in place, HP's bean counters didn't detect the problem until 10 days after the quarter was over.

Her reaction:

At an emergency meeting Sunday, Fiorina told analysts she was raising HP's sales growth target for fiscal 2001 from 15% to as much as 17%. "We hit a speed bump-a big speed bump-this quarter," she said in a speech broadcast to employees a few days later. "But does it mean, 'Gee, this is too hard?' No way. In blackjack, you double down when you have an increasing probability of winning. And we're going to double down."

Blackjack?

Doing it all over again

Why they appointed Patricia Dunn after that is not hard to explain - they were still dazzled by FemBiz but it ended the same way:

On September 5, 2006 Newsweek published a story revealing that the chairwoman of HP, Patricia Dunn, had hired a team of independent electronic-security experts that later spied on HP board members and several journalists, to determine the source of leak of confidential details regarding HP's long-term strategy in January, 2006.

No one wants to say it and she herself vigorously denies it with her talk of management being "gender neutral" but it's not gender neutral on a number of counts:

1] There is a far shorter tradition for women in management and en masse these are basically the pioneers in the field in this single generation - they're clearly going to make mistakes because they don't have generations of businesswomen before them;

2] A woman is not a man. She will therefore attract resistance not only from sections of the male populace but from her own gender as well. With a man, gender is less of an issue, whatever the feminists say;

3] Aggressive business columns asking "Are women better managers?" and so on, citing their people skills and more consensus based team approach but the man's top-down hierarchical and anachronistic methods does precisely what Carly Fiorina claimed it didn't - it turns it into a gender issue. This gets backs up.

4] Far from being the gentle, consensus type manager such as Lew Platt, most of the women clawing to the top posts are a type. Aggressive enough for the job, yes. Hard enough inside?

Whom to measure Fiorina and Hunt against?

Well that's the crux of the matter. Both Fiorina and Hunt, when compared with the Morgans and Carnegies are hard in the boardroom but under extreme pressure become brittle and resentful - Oprah Winfrey, though not a businesswoman per se, is an example.

It's pointless saying that so many men are hopeless managers because I know it. I see it every day but Fiorina must be compared to the Morgans and Carnegies, not with the mass of miinor male managers out there who have reached their level. Fiorina was playng for the top rung and must be measured against that.

Such women as this not only lack warmth but they are not capable of dissembling enough to make it appear they care. Agatha Christie, a successful woman herself, said, through Poirot:

"Women are never kind," remarked Poirot, "Though they can sometimes be tender." [“After the Funeral”, 1953]

Don't forget the card Sarkozy, himself no stranger to passionate outbursts, played in his debate with Royal:

Sarkozy: Calm yourself, Madame.

Royal: No, I will not calm down.

Sarkozy: You need to be calm to be president of the Republic. . . . I don't know why Mrs. Royal, who is normally so calm, has lost her cool.

Royal: I have not lost my cool! I am angry, sometimes it is right and healthy to be angry. The president of the Republic should be angry at injustice.

Sarkozy: You fly off the handle very easily . . .

Women best in start-up companies

Why this obsessed madness to prove someone is something he or she is not? I believe there are many companies in which women under less pressure can excel in. My own step-sister runs a string of craft shops and don't laugh at this - she turns in quite a nice revenue, thank you very much.

The thing is, the company is hers. She started it, just like Halley Suitt above. she developed its culture. My other step-sister ran a printing business and helped set me up. She was everything a manager should be - helpful to a fault but gently insisting on product after a certain time. She's very big in Zonta.

These are two great businesswomen in companies such as theirs.

But HP is not such a company - it's an Alpha male jungle where only a powerful, compassionate, virtually all-knowing CEO, with generations of expertise behind him and "clubbable contacts" can make the cut.

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