On Carly Fiorina ... Little Miss Big Blue, Come Blow Your Horn Also last week while many people were out, it appears that one of our favorite CEOs decided to sell 40% of his actionable shares. That would be Lou Gerstner, in case anybody missed it. Hey, why not? The price was certainly ridiculous. Of course, you can't talk about Lou without thinking of his female wannabe, Carly Fiorina, the subject of an editorial in today's Wall Street Journal called "Beware of the Self-Promoting CEO." (Registration required for a two-week trial.) I have made no secret of my disdain for this woman, for the way she has handled the reins at a heretofore-magnificent company, namely Hewlett-Packard. The article discusses all of her attempts to promote herself under the guise of promoting Hewlett-Packard. In a particularly wonderful vignette that compares her to Katherine Graham, she comes out rather poorly: "Katie and Carly. One took a good company and made it great, the other has thus far taken a great company and made it good. One embodies the type of leadership required for true greatness, the other has thus far shown the type of leadership that erodes greatness. One saw the purpose of it all as far beyond herself, the other has acted as if the supreme purpose is herself." I think that sums it up nicely.
Don't Cry For Me, Fiorina Let me go back a bit and talk about why I don't like Carly. When she took over Hewlett-Packard, her arrogance was stunning as she talked about her plans to deliver returns that to me were obviously going to be impossible, given the nuclear winter scenario developing in computing land. To refresh everyone's memory, people had just gorged themselves on getting new computer hardware before Y2K, and we also coincidentally had the Internet mania build-out. The fact is that anyone with a working knowledge of the computing industry should have been able to understand this, although a lot didn't. In any case, she made all kinds of bombastic claims. Straight away on her first conference call, she stopped giving out new-order information that would have allowed people to ascertain what was going on. She resorted to just doing a whole lot of arm waving, which was why it was quickly knowable that she was not the right person to run Hewlett-Packard. Of course, all events since then have only helped reinforce that view.
Source: The Market Wrap |
