Silicon Valley parlor game: How long will Fiorina last?
BY PETER DELEVETT
Mercury News
What's the most popular parlor game in Silicon Valley? In certain circles, it's predicting how long Carly Fiorina will last as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
The buzz can be heard everywhere from the venture capital boardrooms of Sand Hill Road to the investor message boards of Yahoo.
``There's been pretty rampant speculation about how long Carly will last,'' says Kenneth Sawyer, managing director of Saints Ventures in San Francisco.
There's no evidence that Hewlett-Packard's chief executive is in imminent danger of losing her job, despite the company's stumbles under her two-year watch. In recent interviews with the Mercury News, HP board members give Fiorina a hearty thumbs-up and say she's on track in the slow process of turning around the valley's most storied franchise.
Fiorina herself has said that turning around HP is a three-year odyssey, and the board promised to give her at least that long to prove her mettle.
Fiorina, of course, isn't the only top exec whose company is becalmed in the economy's doldrums -- far from it.
So why are people placing bets on her life expectancy as a CEO and not on, say, Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems?
For one thing, high-profile chiefs like McNealy and Oracle's Larry Ellison have a track record. Sun's stock may be down 70 percent this year -- compared to HP's 60 percent -- but valley veterans know McNealy has ridden through tough times before.
Fiorina, by contrast, is a first-time CEO who made a name for herself at Lucent Technologies, a company with deep-seated problems that were masked during her tenure there. Fiorina is also a newcomer to the clubby world of the valley's tech elite.
Fiorina may also be catching the backlash from a splashy HP marketing campaign featuring herself -- a veteran marketeer -- as the centerpiece.
Operating in the spotlight can raise the stakes during a turnaround, says John Sculley, the former Apple Computer CEO who knows what it's like to try to steer a new course for a celebrity company.
``When you are doing it all in high-profile public view, as I did at Apple and Carly is doing now at HP, the media loves to build you up, so that if you make a mistake they can have as big of a story on the way down,'' he says.
Seagate Technology CEO Steve Luczo, whose company counts HP among its customers, argues that what sustained HP through the years wasn't marketing, but technology. ``That's where you want to plow your dollars. The marketing will flow automatically,'' says Luczo, who cuts a lower profile than his larger-than-life predecessor, Al Shugart.
An HP spokeswoman says employees steeped in HP's engineering-centric culture might not understand the company needs a ``face'' to help it rise above the din of competitors.
``Dave Thomas has been doing TV ads for years,'' the spokeswoman notes, referring to the founder of the Wendy's burger chain. ``Is it new for HP? You bet.''
But some critics say HP reminds them of a different Wendy's commercial: Where's the beef?
That's especially true of some HP employees, who've struggled to adapt to the new world order. Flip over a rock in the valley these days and you're likely to find an HP worker or ex-worker with complaints about the brusque changes that has Fiorina has made in the company's culture.
There's no denying she's breaking with HP tradition. Perhaps the starkest illustration of that: Fiorina is said not to return phone calls from her predecessor, HP career man Lew Platt.
Platt, savoring his second retirement in the wine country, declines to say if there's a rift. HP's spokeswoman asks: ``Do you think Lou Gerstner asked John Akers how to run IBM?''
Even within HP's board, there can be some tug-of-war between new members and old-timers who pine for the ways of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, says board member Robert Knowling.
``It gets spirited sometimes,'' says Knowling, the former CEO of Covad Communications, who joined HP's board at Fiorina's invitation.
Yet another factor behind the parlor game is gender. Fiorina brushes off questions about whether she's judged differently than her male counterparts.
But Pepper Schwarz, a sociologist at the University of Washington who specializes in gender issues, says people still aren't used to the idea of a female CEO -- especially one who looks like Fiorina.
``If she looks unglamorous like Janet Reno, we get that,'' Schwarz says. ``When there's a woman that's sexy and attractive and sophisticated, we're kind of amazed that she's got that kind of power.''
And when glamour CEOs of either gender stumble, they take a heavier hit of blame, Schwarz adds. ``The more charismatic, the more you stand out -- the more, frankly, that people are envious -- the more you have to deliver.''
Fiorina watchers predict she'll be spared serious heat while the larger economy continues to suffer.
But Knowling, who considers Fiorina a longtime friend and says he's confident she'll prevail, nonetheless notes it sometimes takes more than one CEO to turn around a troubled corporate behemoth. Gerstner of IBM and Jac Nasser of Ford Motor have faced similar challenges.
``The jury probably has settled that Gerstner did a hell of a job of resurrecting that company,'' Knowling says. ``I'd say the jury's out on my good friends Jac Nasser and Carly, and time will tell if they can pull it off.'' |
