[OT]: carly(tm) as book fodder

From: John Smith (a_at_nonymous.com)
Date: 11/01/04 

Date: Mon, 1 Nov 2004 08:39:15 -0500

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200411/beam
>From the November 2004 issue (subscription required)

The Boardroom

Books About Schnooks

They are the very models of the modern chief executive
by Alex Beam

......

A few women have broken through the proverbial glass ceiling, but only one
has had two books written about her: Carly Fiorina, the chairman and CEO of
the Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard. Fiorina, who in 1999 was drafted into
the top job at HP on the strength of a puffy 1998 Fortune cover story about
her work at Lucent, faced a bitter proxy fight in 2001 launched by Hewlett
and Packard family members who opposed her decision to merge with Compaq.
The prevailing climate of business scandal didn't help her case. Fiorina was
looking like a loser in the fight, George Anders writes in Perfect Enough:
Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard.

Like a senator running for President, Fiorina was cursed with insider
status. Many large pension funds decided to vote against her, in fact,
because she enjoyed the support of HP's board of directors.

No one wants her or his achievements belittled by the conversational
asterisk "because she is a woman" or "because he is black." Reading both
Anders's book and Peter Burrows's Backfire: Carly Fiorina's High-Stakes
Battle for the Soul of Hewlett-Packard, I would have to rate Fiorina's sex
as something of a wash as regards her career. She is not a technologist,
like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but that's hardly unusual; many CEOs hail
from the ranks of marketing or corporate law. Her great skill, according to
Anders, is "aspirational rhetoric." Of her time at Lucent, Anders writes,
"She didn't really sell phone switches. She sold panoramic stories of hope
and progress." (Khurana writes waspishly of Fiorina's Lucent years, "Much of
this 'success,' it was later revealed, was due to creative accounting and
liberal financing of sales to consumers.") Selling panoramic stories of hope
and progress worked for Ronald Reagan. It is working for Carly Fiorina.

There is plenty of evidence that Fiorina is uncomfortable trading on her
sex. For example, Burrows quotes her former University of Maryland Business
School dean as saying that Fiorina was not interested in helping him set up
an M.B.A. course specifically for women: "She doesn't play any of the gender
games. If you perform well, you can't be denied." But she is smart, and will
use the system however she needs to. Once, after Lucent had taken over a
particularly rambunctious computer company, Fiorina appeared onstage with
socks stuffed into her trousers, to reassure her new charges that
"[Lucent's] balls were as big as anyone's" in corporate America. I notice on
HP's Web site that six of the thirteen (bad luck-fire someone immediately!)
members of Fiorina's "executive team" are women-a very high percentage for a
Fortune 50 company.

Membership in the CEO elite has its privileges, and Fiorina is not squeamish
about claiming them. Like Ken Lay, she has a thing for Gulfstreams;
Hewlett-Packard invested $56 million in two G-IVs a few months after she
took over the company. At the time of her hiring, according to Anders, she
asked HP to pay to move her yacht from the East Coast to the West Coast
through the Panama Canal. "Just sell the boat," an HP director told her, and
eventually she did.

 Rakesh Khurana downplays the importance of "charismatic CEOs" like Fiorina,
who, he argues, perform no better or worse than run-of-the-mill
clock-punchers in the long run. ......

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