The Conservative Case Against Carly Fiorina

From Townhall:

First of all, it’s worth noting that Fiorina may have been the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 business, but she turned out to be just as bad at it as Barack Obama has been at running the country. Despite the spin she tries to put in, Carly Fiorina was a disaster for Hewlett Packard.

Fiorina’s story is that she stormed into HP, turned the company around and was unceremoniously fired because she challenged the status quo. In actuality, she insisted on a controversial merger with Compaq, got her way and it decimated the company. Fiorina loves to talk about HP’s increase in raw numbers, but if two large computer companies merge, it’s almost a given that the revenue and the number of patents produced by both companies combined are going to increase. What didn’t increase was HP’s stock price. It dropped from $55 a share when Fiorina took over to a little less than $20 a share under her leadership. There is a reason Fiorina shows up on lists of the Worst CEOs Of All Time (See here, here, here, and here among others) and it’s not because the whole business world is engaged in some kind of conspiracy to portray her as an incompetent.

This is the common belief among business analysts. She was just not a good CEO. However, Justin Fox at Bloomberg Politics argues:

But how much of what happened at HP was Fiorina and how much was reflective of the industry at the time?

Assessments of her 5 1/2 years in charge of tech giant Hewlett-Packard are everywhere these days, most of them negative. Fiorina herself offered a less-than-convincing defense in Wednesday night’s debate — yes, the company’s revenue doubled during her tenure, as she said, but that was mainly because she made a gigantic and controversial acquisition.

That $19 billion purchase of computer maker Compaq was the signature move of Fiorina’s time at HP. It occasioned a revolt led by HP director Walter Hewlett, son of company co-founder Bill Hewlett. It brought criticism from Wall Street and sniping from rivals. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems called it “a slow-motion collision of two garbage trucks.” Michael Dell of Dell Computer said it was the “dumbest deal of the decade,” a doomed attempt to “copy IBM.”
Fiorina was trying to copy IBM, or at least give HP the scale and breadth to compete successfully for corporate clients against Big Blue. Before the Compaq deal (announced in 2001, completed in 2002), she made a run at PricewaterhouseCoopers’s consulting business, only to blanch at the $18 billion price tag. After the deal she got HP into information-technology services in a big way, running IT departments at Procter & Gamble and hundreds of other companies.

“So, no, Carly Fiorina was not the greatest CEO in corporate history. But she certainly wasn’t the worst, either,” wrote Fox.

But back at Townhall:

Let me also add that it’s not fair that Democrats will attack her for firing 30,000 workers because unfortunately, that just comes with the territory when you’re a CEO sometimes. However, if you think it wouldn’t be incredibly effective to point out that Fiorina fired 30,000 workers, tanked the price of the company’s stock, damaged Hewlett Packard so badly that it has yet to recover and STILL walked away with 100 million dollars for being one of the worst CEOs of all time, you’re kidding yourself. For all of his flaws, Mitt Romney was a gifted businessman and the Democrats managed to falsely portray him as a heartless, greedy monster for doing far less than that at Bain Capital.

This is the where Carly is vulnerable, the firing of 30,00 employees and walking away with a ton of money. There is not way she can spin in a way that can be explained in 30 seconds of less.