Management Mistakes and Successes, Tenth Edition

Chapter 12. Hewlett-Packard Under Carly Fiorina, and After Her

In July 1999, Hewlett-Packard, the world's second-biggest computer maker, chose Carly Fiorina to be its CEO. Thus she became the first outsider to take the reins in HP's 60-year history. Never before had it ever filled a top job with an outsider, and now this. Fiorina at that time became one of only three women to head a Fortune 500 company.

Three years later in May 2002, Fiorina engineered the biggest merger in high-tech history, with Compaq Computer. To do so she had to convince government regulators in the United States and Europe that the merger was not anticompetitive. She also had to get stockholder approval in the face of bitter opposition by Walter Hewlett, son of cofounder Bill Hewlett. She even had to survive a court challenge by Hewlett, who claimed she had misled stockholders into voting for the merger.

By August 2003, it looked like the massive merger and the differing corporate cultures were being well assimilated—unlike the problems of many mergers, including several discussed in this book. Was HP to be the model, a paragon, for bringing together two organizations?

Abruptly on February 9, 2005, the board fired her.

CARLY FIORINA

Carleton (Carly) Fiorina disappointed her father, a federal court judge and law professor, by dropping out of law school after one semester at UCLA. (The name Carleton was a tradition that began during the Civil War, when her father's family lost all its men named Carleton. In remembrance, ...