So remember when, in that Jane the Actuary sort of way, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading and summarizing and commenting upon Tough Choices and later the whole story of Fiorina getting fired, from multiple perspectives, including The Big Lie?
Well, on Friday, the AEI had a piece on Fiorina, “What 50 HP execs said about Carly Fiorina — and what that says about the kind of POTUS she might be,” which pretty much confirms what I had figured out before. The author, James Pethokoukis, cites a study in which “Stanford’s Behnam Tabrizi interviewed more than 50 Hewlett Packard executives and mid-level managers who worked for the technology company in the 2004 to 2007 period,” with the conclusions that she was “a visionary, strategist, status quo disruptor, inspirational communicator and performer” who was “a brilliant strategist, putting the company on a footing to compete with the likes of IBM and Sun Microsystems,” but was ” weak in execution and implementation” and should have “brought in a second-in-command, a COO, to enable her to focus on what she did best – strategy and vision.”
The piece also backs up Fiorina’s claim that the success that HP experience after she left the company was due to her strategy, bearing fruit: “[Successor Mark Hurd] was basically implementing the strategy that Fiorina had put in place.”
What does this mean with respect to Fiorina’s presidental run? Nothing directly, as, in the end, I don’t think Americans will pull the lever for someone who’s never been elected to office. But it does raise the question: what skill set is required for a successful president?
Because, yes, strategy and vision are important, and having some plan other than waiting out four years for one’s successor to solve problems (e.g., ISIS) — but, at the same time, having a good plan, not just doing something for the sake of action itself.
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