From the library: Tough Choices by Carly Fiorina

I’ve posted two excerpts from this book already:  a passage on cultural differences, and a passage about women in business, but reading the whole book has been slow going because I haven’t had a lot of down time (or, rather, the down time has been family time).  But I’ll present my summary to you, with more excerpts.  And, yes, of course, this is Carly Fiorina’s life as she perceives it, and I’m not going to try to second-guess and talk back at her, and will simply say “she did X” rather than “she says that X”.  (I do have another book on the reading pile, called The Big Lie, about what went on at HP, and I have a collection of links on my facebook page waiting to be turned into a blog post.  But — spoiler alert! — I find the story she tells to be fairly credible.)

Ready?  Let’s begin, and please bear with me on the length of this.  I tend to approach such books by tearing off little mini-bookmarks and flagging pages as I go, or by marking a few notes and page numbers on my notepaper-bookmark, so my summary will now largely be a matter of flipping through and landing at these page markings.  Feel free to refer to her wikipedia biography for more specific dates and details (even in her book, she makes only passing reference to her age and the passing of time).

The book was written in 2006, after her departure from HP, so well prior to her becoming involved in politics, and, while she spends a lot of the later part of the book on her years at HP, slightly more than half the book is devoted to her career up to that point.  She covers her childhood in one chapter — the daughter of a law professor whose work necessitated moving often, she developed purposeful strategies for making friends, the simplest of which was simply asking lots of questions to make the “prospect” feel interested-in.  She also loved piano, and considered aiming at playing professionally (though, unlike Condoleezza Rice, I can’t find anything online that indicates she continues to play).  She covers her college career in the next chapter:  she loved her studies in medieval history and philosophy, but graduated having no idea what to do, so she went to law school, but was miserable, and dropped out after the first semester.

Having left law school, she had no idea what to do next (hey, that’s me!  except I didn’t become a Fortune 20 CEO).  So, in 1976, she took a look at the want ads, and found a job as a receptionist for a small property brokerage firm.  Not only did she discover that she enjoyed the work, but the brokers took an interest in her and encouraged her to train to become a broker for their firm, which first gave her reason to believe that she could ultimately work in the world of business.  Before that, though, she married and moved with her husband to Italy, where he was doing graduate study; upon their return, she earned her MBA at the University of Maryland, while her husband finished his studies in Washington D.C., and then found work as a management trainee at AT&T, in the days just before the breakup.

Fiorina struggles to find her place, but at the same time she is engaged by her work in the sales department, learning about AT&T’s customers and their needs, and trying to meet those needs.  She also tells that sort of “women in business” story that one hopes doesn’t happen any longer, but it did to her:  being disinvited from a client meeting she was supposed to attend with her manager who was supposed to transition projects to her, because those clients had asked to meet at a local strip club.  Undaunted (well, quite daunted, actually), she forges ahead and attends:

I arrived at the destination, took a deep breath, straightened my bow tie (Dress for Success for Women, a must-read in those days, recommended floppy bows tied at the throat of all blouses) and stepped into The Board Room.  It was very dark and very loud.  There was a long bar down the right-hand side of the place and a large stage to my left.  There was a live act going on with probably ten or more women.  My colleagues were sitting as far from the door as possible, and the only way to reach them was to cross in front of that stage.  I clutched my briefcase tighter and walked to their table, looking seriously out of place and quite ridiculous.

I was cordial and tried to appear relaxed, tried to sound knowledgeable about BIA business, and desperately tried to ignore what was going on all around me.  David was in high spirits and really didn’t have much interest in working.  He was slugging back gin and tonic and kept calling the women over to dance on top of the table.  The other men were either amused or slightly embarrassed, but no one tried to stop him.  In a show of empathy that brings tears to my eyes still, each woman who approached the table would look the situation over and say, “Sorry, gentlemen.  Not till the lady leaves.”

Now, it turned out, David was an alcoholic, but they developed a good working relationship, based on his knowledge and client relationships, and her ability to learn.  She moved to new teams, became a manager, and learned about other areas of the business, all the while getting promoted and having authority over increasing numbers of people. All the while, she describes her experiences learning about managing and leadership not so much in terms of finances, or P&L, as working with others, doing right by them (and defending them against colleagues who are abusive, even if just verbally abusive), but at the same time motivating them to achieve their potential, and holding them to account.  She also describes pursuing a major sale, in which she had to push the individual in charge of the account, who appeared almost indifferent to the task at hand, and ultimately brought in considerable resources and executives support, and ultimately had her first experience of having to fire an employee.  She learns about the importance of strategy, but also experienced corruption — they lost a major government contract, successfully appealed (as is apparently possible), and along the way learned that the decision-makers had been bribed.

In the meantime, she discovered that her husband had been cheating on her, they divorced, and she remarried.  Frank, her new husband, had two daughters from a prior marriage; they never had children together, though because of infertility not intentional childlessness.

She also, being groomed for greater things, is sponsored to attend MIT for a master of science in management under the Sloan Fellows program, and describes her experiences as energizing and the coursework engaging; she mentions specifically such topics as game theory, systems thinking, and organizational psychology, and she later references what she learned.  When she returned to AT&T, she moved to Network Systems, the manufacturing side of the company, with a vaguely defined role related to strategy and international business — the director of International Strategy and Business Development.  It’s here that her story about negotiations in Italy comes in; she also travels to Korea and learns about Korean customs (and later Japan and China), including the focus on entertaining and drinking with clients.

Over the years I would participate in many drinking rituals in Korea, Japan, and China.  I would learn to prepare myself mentally, to prepare myself physically by eating the right kinds of foods ahead of time, and to toss liquor straight back in my throat, not sip it, so that the alcohol is absorbed more slowly into the system.

I came to appreciate these rituals.  I made good friends in China because of them.  It is true that trust, respect, and shared experience make it easier to do business.  It is true that participating in others’ customs lays foundations for common understanding.

One “cultural tradition”, however, she refuses to participate in — as she describes a meeting in Brazil with government ministers, at which it becomes clear to her that she’s expected to bribe those officials, and the local management intends to do so; she acts to have him fired.

In addition to her travels, she also learns to take this undefined role and build a team, work with them to develop a strategy, and motivate them to apply the strategy.  She isn’t afraid to set up silly-seeming challenges to encourage her team to meet their goals.  (Side comment here:  one of my failings in my work life is that I just can’t get myself deeply interested in what’s going on in the wider company.  Fiorina, in contrast, in her story, cares deeply about how well she and her team do, not simply as a matter of getting the bonus or the next raise or promotion, but really exudes a feeling of mission far more than the trite “mission statement.”)

And along the way, Network Systems is spun off into Lucent Technologies, and she is thrust into the lead role in the spin-off.  “Our enthusiasm about our new company and our new mission was obvious to anyone who listened to us.”

 The road show was a mind-numbering three weeks of eight presentations a day.  And yet I loved every minutes of it — the intense pleasure of the seamless team that Henry, Jim and I became, the thrill of doing something for the very first time, the excitement of talking about something I believed in so deeply, the knowledge that we were building a company right before our very eyes.

Fiorina continues to hold high-ranking executive positions at Lucent until, in February 1999, she is recruited by HP; after a long series of interviews, she is hired for the job.

Why did HP select an outsider CEO?  Because HP was stuck in a rut.

HP lacked, and desperately needed, an external focus on customers and competitors; that time was not on our side, and a sense of urgency was required; and that synergy was the key to unlocking the unique value of the Hewlett-Packard Company.

She says that the vaunted “HP way” was used as an excuse for slacking off, and that the tradition of temporary pay cuts during economic downturns had gone too far, not firing anyone ever, no matter how poorly they performed.  She describes a business structure in which each entity within the company, and there were many, basically ran their business wholly independently, so much so that multiple sales teams called on clients with no clue as to what the others were doing; multiple research projects were developing similar items, etc.  Even the CFO didn’t have any line of sight as to the financial results until the CFOs of the business units completed all their reporting and sent it in.  She describes a research project at HP Labs called Cool Town, which impressed her as deeply innovative, but was slated to be shut down because none of the business units were interested in something that integrated capabilities from multiple units.

There was also a serious lack of marketing, and 150 brands rather than a single unified HP brand.

She was brought in with a mission to reshape HP, and the layoffs that later occurred were a part of this process.  While, on paper, a “forced ranking” system had existed, in practice all employees had been ranked highly, so her imposition of such a system was not new so much as insisting on following through on a previously-established system.  (Another side note:  I do oppose such “forced ranking” systems in which the bottom 5% or 10% is continually canned, and I’m not sure, from Fiorina’s description, if that’s what happened here, vs. a matter of removing those who were genuinely poor performers and consolidating duplicate roles.)

At the same time, though she faced resistance from employees who didn’t want change, she made extensive efforts to meet with employees, and increase employee communication company-wide, rather than just silo-by-silo, even developing an intranet system where none had existed.

In the meantime, much as she wanted to be treated as “a CEO who happens to be a woman,” she couldn’t escape the “woman CEO” notoriety, worsened by not coming from a tech background.

From my first until my last day at HP, I was criticized both for being in the press too much and for being unavailable to the press.  From the first stories of my hiring until the last of my firing, both the language and the intensity of the coverage were different for me than for any other CEO  It was more personal, with much more commentary about my personality and my physical appearance, my dress, my hair or my shoes.  That first week, the editor of BusinessWeek came to see me with the beat reporter because they’d been working on a story for several months.  Hewlett-Packard was going to be the cover story whether we liked it or not, and everyone recommended that I talk with them.  Before we’d even sat down, the very first question from the editor was “Is that an Armani suit you’re wearing?”

Vanity Fair, despite being warned numerous times that they were writing fiction about me, continued to report that I traveled constantly with a hairdersser and a makeup artist.  There was a persistent rumor, bolstered by commentary in the local press, that I’d built a pink marble bathroom in my office.  (I had actually moved into my predecessor’s office and neither built nor bought anything for it.)  There were no private bathrooms or even doors in executive offices.  The CEOs of Lucent, Cisco, IBM, Dell, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Compaq, Oracle, GE, 3M, Dupont and son on all flew in corporate jets, and HP had owned them for thirty years.  Nevertheless, my travel on a company plane was reported as evidence of my disrespect for the HP Way, my “regal” nature, my “distance” from employees.

Along the way, by the way, she cites several times, her favorite Lao Tzu quote:

A good leader is he whom men revere.  An evil leader is he whom men despise.  A great leader is he of whom the people say, “We did it ourselves.”

So she begins making changes.  Along the way, some board members and other executives get cold feet, and she has to persuade them to stay the course.

Early on, “toward the end of 2000,”, discussions begin about acquiring Compaq, as a way of remedying competitive deficiencies with the company.  She doesn’t initiate this, but instead another executive raises the idea with her, and, in fact, the CEO of Compaq even visits and proposes an acquisition.  The board deliberated the acquisition extensively but they approved it, and it was announced on September 4, 2001, unknowably terrible timing.  What’s more, shortly after the announcement, Walter Hewlett, son of the founding Hewlett, changed his mind, announced his opposition, and convinced the Hewlett and Packard families and foundations to oppose the acquisition in the proxy vote.  Employees who were opposed to the changes Fiorina was making allied with him, and Hewlett even conducted bogus “surveys” of employees to prove their opposition.

The media took up the story and positioned it as one of CEO greed.  Accusations were levied that she had handpicked board members, when, in fact, with one exception, they hired her, not the reverse.  In the end, the proxy fight was won, but not without a lot of unpleasantness, and she set to work with integration.  There were growing pains, but by 2003-2004, the company is strong, profitable, and innovative.

It is no exaggeration to say I routinely worked twelve- or fourteen-hour days, slept little and thought always about HP.  It is also impossible to overstate my deep satisfaction with what we’d accomplished as 2004 drew to a close . . .

The only clouds on the horizon were the press and the stock price.  These were not insignificant, but I believed that the strong performance we would deliver over the coming year would take care of both in time. . . . The year 2005 was going to be the payoff year for all the grueling work since July of 1999.

So what went wrong?

Board politics started to become an issue.  Three board members proposed, out of nowhere, a plan for wholly reorganizing the company.  Board members wanted to re-instate a member who had left a short time ago at the mandatory retirement age, as a personal favor to him.  On other issues, due, board members began to disagree and, after a extensive three-day meeting, she learned that reports of their confidential discussions had been leaked to the Wall Street Journal.  All board members later denied having done so, and Fiorina, not seeing the urgency, determines that outside counsel would investigate, and a short time later, Larry Sosini (who I think is the lawyer, but I’ve lost track) reported to the board that he’s confirmed there were at least two, maybe three, leakers.  The board had also simply become dysfunctional on other ways.

A further board meeting was scheduled, in February, this time in Chicago to avoid media speculation.  She prepared an extended speech (which she reprinted in the book), which she read.  Then the board dismissed her, and left her waiting for 3 hours, and they all left, too, with only two members waiting when she was summoned to return, to tell her that she’d been fired.

What happened?  Had the board responded to the stock price drop?  To these changes within the board and the divisions which had appeared?  The vote was divided; and the ouster occured on a one-vote margin.

And here ends her story.  Thanks for sticking with me!  Next:  her follow-up book, with what happened next.