Ex-HP CEO Carly Fiorina Hired By Fox News 256
neutrino38 writes "The International Herald Tribune reports that Fox News hired Carly Fiorina, ex-HP CEO. Such an interesting move will certainly bring support to those who viewed her as the over-hyped CEO who killed the original corporate engineering culture know as 'the HP way.'
The article, off course, does not elaborate on this aspect of things. Slashdot has previously reported her demise from HP and some comments mentioned some HP employee dancing in the cubicles then."
A Question for Current HP employees.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A Question for Current HP employees.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A Question for Current HP employees.. (Score:5, Interesting)
As an employee of HP only because they bought my company, I can attest to the fact that HP is no longer a monolithic institution, but rather a bunch of components jammed up against each other operating largely autonomously.
It's what the stockholders want I guess, and will only become more prevalent as HP continues its pace of rapid acquisitions.
I already said my piece(s) (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2003/09/20/hp-covers-up-gulfstream-buys [theinquirer.net]
But sadly I can't claim this piece of genius.
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2003/10/28/hps-carly-fiorina-hates-fags [theinquirer.net]
-Charlie
Last Days of HP (Score:5, Interesting)
When I started at HP they were much like the way Google is described to be now. While I'd have to say that Google is HP on steroids, since HP offered great coffee, tea, and often sweet rolls in the well-equipped snack nooks around the cubical farms, and a well-subsidized cafeteria -- in contrast, Google offers free meals and transportation, among other amenities -- but the idea was the same. HP employees had a lot of freedom towards arranging their own transportation to other HP sites as they determined their requirements to be, specified and ordered their own personal computer equipment including printers, and generally were given a lot of freedom to do their jobs.
Over the next year and a half under Lew, much of that went away in ways that make it clear it would never return. It was belt tightening time, and a lot of it happened in areas like this one, including two job freezes.
When Carley did arrive, she was very warmly received by all of HP. There was great enthusiasm -- and perhaps not too much looking back at what she'd (un)accomplished at Lucient. Right up to the time I left, pretty much everyone was behind her, and much jazzed about having a woman CEO -- and a relatively young woman at that.
Yes things got worse after that in ways are that well known. But in fairness, I saw the first signs of decline before she ever arrived.
Best Carley joke from that era: After she visited our facility (contractors not allowed to attend the actual meeting) we were told that the lovely palm trees in the courtyard were going to be cut down after Carley had found out that they weren't going to meet their 15% growth target for the next year.
Re:A Question for Current HP employees.. (Score:3, Interesting)
But speaking as someone who worked in that environment in the past, but now works in a large monolithic company...count your blessings
Re:A Question for Current HP employees.. (Score:3, Interesting)
When Dave Packard died, upper management and the bean counters started salivating.
When Bill Hewlett died in 2001, these same people instantly sought to change the "HP Way" to try and get a couple more percent in growth. The rest is modern history.
Re:Fox News the News you want to hear. (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone linked to NPR (National Public Radio, for the non-American readers)'s story about Reagan's funeral, and said "When Clinton dies, if you can find me a Fox News anchor that describes him as a 'great American', then you can talk to me about the liberal media."
Re:[OT] Re:Best of luck! (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's look at the evidence.
In the months leading up to the 2000 election (roughly 18ish), the Fed continued to raise rates despite low inflation numbers. Indeed despite candidate Bush being lambasted for "talking down the economy" for warning of the very recession he would be blamed for in the coming months. There was much discussion about what it was, exactly, that Greenspan feared. Especially in light of the dot-com collapse which occurred at roughly the same time and lead in part to the recession of late 2000, early 2001.
Greenspan was making anti-exuberance moves at a time when the market was already cooling off.
Either Greenspan was unaware of the impending slowdown or he was actively trying to enhance a recession which would take place in Clinton's successor's presidency. The only reason I can think of to do that on purpose would be to set up the successor (who everyone expected to be Gore) for failure, leading to nostalgia for the Clinton presidency and therefore support for a Senator Clinton 2004 presidential run. Such nostalgia would be necessary to overcome an incumbent Gore's near-automatic party nomination.
It's especially brilliant since Gore would have been unwilling to take potentially revenue reducing steps like capital gains tax and income tax reductions during a recession, a position which would only exacerbate the situation.
I'm not convinced that he actually had this as a plan, though. Its flaws are glaringly obvious to anyone capable of conceiving it. I think it's far more likely that Greenspan is a moderately effective bureaucrat who's had disproportionate superstar status painted on him by virtue of his high post.
It's a symptom of the same problem which propagates the idea of the "Corporate Savior" CEO, allowing an artificially small pool of mostly competent, but not astoundingly so, individuals to command enormous salaries. He was kept on by virtue of a desire not to "rock the boat" in financial circles, which ironically would probably have had more effect on the economy than any of his actual decisions.
Ditto that. (Score:1, Interesting)
For me, the kicker was when HP mandated Drug Testing for Contractors. Heh, what a joke. The top technical contractors won't do Drug Testing. First, there's the invasion of privacy issue. Then there's the cost associated with just one false positive. That will stay on your record permanently, and I can guarantee you that it will cost you work.
There's nothing like driving away the top technical talent like Drug testing. Most (nearly all I daresay) of HP's competition doesn't require it. And so, they drove away their good people right into the arms of their competition.
Personally, I've been absolutely delighted to help HP's competitors. A pity though. HP used to be a good place.
Re:-1 Flamebait (Score:2, Interesting)
Wow, how clever. Take a broadcast where Mr. O'Reilly refers to NBC and trim out all references then put it up there with a TV capture of the show displaying the Fox News logo.
For what it's worth, I flip around the various news stations. My observation is that many of the commentators on Fox News have conservative/traditional views. What I don't see are commentators going to bat for Republicans acting badly just because they are Republicans. In fact, Fox News is more critical of Republicans than other news organizations, precisely because their commentators tend to criticize non-conservative polices from any candidates, whether they be Republican or Democrat. Also, not every commentator or guest necessarily has the same views. For instance, O'Reilly is really pretty liberal, at least in the more traditional sense of the word. My dad refers to this as "New York Liberal." On the other hand, there are guys on there like Hannity who are very conservative and fairly close-minded about it. Hannity clearly comes off as being a Republican cheerleader although occasionally he makes a good point. I also see quite a number of moderate Democrats as well as the occasional far-left Democrat. And often times, even the far-left Democrats have a well-reasoned point even if I happen to disagree with their conclusion. The moderate ones almost always have a very well-reasoned point.
On the other hand, I can hardly stand to watch MSNBC anymore. It feels like I'm watching a Democrat rally. Any politician who kow-tows to the far left wing of the Democrat party gets a pass. Everyone else gets slandered.
I'll tell you one thing I don't like about Fox News though: Alan Colmes. Not because he's liberal, but because his schtick is to give Hannity a hard time. Half the time I don't believe he even believes what he's saying. He does exactly the sort of Democrat cheerleading that MSNBC does except not as well. I used to watch the program but lately I flip off the TV after O'Reilly. If I want to get a balanced viewpoint, O'Reilly's program is far better because despite claims otherwise, he does give his guests a fair shake.
O'Reilly also serves a good purpose of weeding out the idiots who otherwise look good. Take Ron Paul for instance. Mr. Paul sounds good at first, a libertarian with conservative religious views and liberal social views. Then you find out he's on the "get out of Iraq now, damn the consequences" bandwagon. Well, I'm sorry, but that line of thinking is not what I'm looking for in my next president. Even Hillary Clinton has softened her position on the war to that of a reasoned debate rather than a knee-jerk reaction. I'd sooner vote for Clinton than Paul and I don't like many of Clinton's viewpoints at all.
Of course, the "damn the consequences" viewpoint is very prevalent so I'm sure that Paul's idiocy appeals to a lot of people who are also idiots.
Re:[OT] Re:Best of luck! (Score:3, Interesting)
". Its flaws are glaringly obvious to anyone capable of conceiving it. "
You are applying hindsight and finding patterns in noise.
Re:A Question for Current HP employees.. (Score:3, Interesting)
As an employee of HP only because they bought my company, I can attest to the fact that HP is no longer a monolithic institution, but rather a bunch of components jammed up against each other operating largely autonomously.
Re:Last Days of HP (Score:5, Interesting)
It is true that there was a period of increasing frugality at HP just before C. Fiorina's advent, but that was truly due to economic conditions, and HP was handling the crisis in its traditional way: instead of laying off employees, HP was saving money in other ways. After all, this was the company that once temporarily cut everyone's salary by about 15% instead of having layoffs. (The reductions were restored when times got better.)
It was only under C.F.'s reign that layoffs were first introduced. However, I do not believe that the reasons for these layoffs were primarily economic—they were moral and political. HP had a well-skilled cadre of professionals with high self esteem; these people thought they mattered. C.F. perceived this as a problem; thus, she proceeded to show the technical staff of HP that they were a disposable commodity by decimating them. I use this word in the old, Roman sense: to instill a proper fear of management, to restore discipline to the level desired by the commanders, you kill a tenth of the men at random. This has a most salutory effect on the survivors.
I worked at HP during this time. Like many, I had been an employee of a company that was bought by HP. At first, the change seemed to be benign—HP was not quite as good a place to work as my old one had been, but it was still pretty decent. That changed with the advent of C.F. It's hard to describe the feeling of helpless despair that became prevalent in my workplace as wave after wave of layoffs swept through it like a series of plagues. The first couple were justified as "getting rid of the deadwood", and you were supposed to feel good that you were not classed among the victims. With successive layoffs, the reasons became progressively thinner, until they achieved total transparency. One layoff was actually announced by management as being "random"; we were supposed think that this meant "fair".
As any student of Josef Stalin's methods knows, the best terror is random terror. If people do not know how to behave to avoid being struck down by the Centurion's truncheon, they become paralyzed by fear. They become docile, easily managed victims that have no self-esteem, make no demands, and are neurotically eager to obey their masters. They become perfect corporate employees.
This was not a phenomenon isolated to HP; HP merely furnishes a particularly egregious example of how the corporations dealt with a perceived threat to their sovereignty that emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century—the rise of a new intelligentsia, composed of technically savvy "knowledge workers" who acquired a sense of empowerment through their understanding of how the new computer and communications technologies worked. This "geek" intelligentsia thought of itself as autonomous, as being outside the old paradigm of boss and peon. But the essence of corporatism is control; consequently, the corporations moved to suppress the intelligentsia using a variety of methods, both subtle and (as in HP's case) not so subtle. Today, their victory seems complete.
Lest I be accused of digression from the topic at hand...I wonder if C.F. had to take a 25% pay cut at her new job, compared to her HP salary, as did I?
In fairness to Carly, she was correct. (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe you could argue that she was just a stupid, bleached-blond bimbo who randomly stumbled upon the correct course of action, but in fairness to Carly, her vision was correct: Only the large [really the massively, monstrously gi-normous] will survive.
HP's choices were to continue to grow [with the acquisition of Compaq] or to die.
[Cf Tuesday's Register article [channelregister.co.uk] about Gateway: Gateway failed to grow, and now Gateway is dead.]
And the stocks have proven that she was correct:
At HP, Carly faced two dilemmas:
1) Everyone is in the business of selling commodity computers these days, and only the largest will survive at that game [in particular, HP needed the higher-margin server business which distinguished Compaq from the rest of the competition], and
2) Like it or not [and most Slashdotters aren't going to like it very much], there just isn't any money to be made in the sale of scientific equipment, as the history of Agilent's stock proves.
Now you can argue that it would be really "nice" if a big company like HP could subsidize a bunch of really "neat", cutting-edge research [the way that AT&T used to do with Bell Labs, back when AT&T was a monopoly, or the way that Xerox used to do with PARC, back when Xerox was a monopoly, or, to a lesser extent, the way that Microsoft & Google appear to be doing now, while they are still monopolies], but Carly's duty was not to the scientific community: Carly's duty was to her shareholders, and her vision proved to be correct.
Heck, just compare the results of her vision with the current state of affairs at IBM, whose stock has been absolutely stagnant [yahoo.com] for the last eight years:
QED.
Re:[OT] Re:Best of luck! (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm not kidding; I've argued with Republicans about this very subject, and this is their view. They see no problem at all with deficit spending, and think there should be no limits to it.
Reporter group-think (Score:3, Interesting)
Rush's theory is that it is a example of group-think. You have people squished into a room all day. They become friends, etc, etc. They start to use the same language. It's not unnecessarily nefarious. It is just lazy.