Carleton S. Fiorina is in it to win it.
The “it” the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard seeks is a US Senate seat from California. Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer has held the seat for three terms and is furiously raising money for re-election next year.
Carly Fiorina made it official this month that she is a candidate for the Republican nomination to oppose Boxer. Her celebrity and wealth may not guarantee that she’ll get the nod, however. She faces Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, an Orange County Republican, in next year’s primary, and that will be her first test in electoral politics.
Fiorina isn’t the only ex-CEO of a big Silicon Valley company seeking political office in 2010. Meg Whitman, the retired chief executive of eBay, is challenging for the Republican nomination for governor of California, and she’s contending with a bigger field of rivals for that nomination.
After undergoing treatment for breast cancer earlier this year, Fiorina faces uphill battles in her political debut. The Republican primary may turn nasty, as conservative ideologues are targeting the Senate races in California and Florida. For many in the GOP, “moderate” is an epithet with nearly the opprobrium reserved for “liberal” and “socialist.” Gov. Charlie Crist is being questioned as insufficiently conservative in the Florida race for the Republican nomination, and the party awaits to see the verdict of its leaders on whether they favor Fiorina or DeVore in California. Much sentiment and momentum may turn on which sides are taken by influential media commentators, such as Rush Limbaugh and the FOX News Channel’s Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
The campaign will, no doubt, focus on Fiorina’s tenure as CEO of HP from 1999 to 2005. She presided over the company’s spinoff of Agilent Technologies, the instrument manufacturer, although that deal was in progress when she came onboard. The centerpiece of her time as HP’s CEO was the company’s multibillion-dollar acquisition of Compaq Computer, a transaction that pitted her against Walter Hewlett, son of co-founder William Hewlett, and others who opposed the megamerger. Fiorina ultimately prevailed in that shareholder battle, but the enmity it created may have mortally wounded her career at HP.
Long seen as a marketing whiz, Fiorina was resented by many of HP’s employees, who saw her management style as the antithesis of “the HP Way,” the homey, somewhat paternalistic corporate code fostered by Bill Hewlett and David Packard. The HP Way, with its emphasis on listening to employees through “management by walking around,” deeply contrasted with the button-down, Man in the Gray Flannel Suit mores of IBM and other HP rivals. It was strong stuff for its time — in the 1950s and 1960s. In more recent decades, however, the HP Way became associated with pleasant perks for employees, like the carts dispensing free coffee and doughnuts to engineers in their cubicles.
As the integration of Compaq proceeded apace, with the usual layoffs and cost-cutting, internal resentment against Fiorina bubbled up from the employee ranks into the boardroom at 3000 Hanover Street in Palo Alto. When the quarterly numbers started going south and the stock price continued to slide, Fiorina lost her base of support on the HP board, and she was forced to resign, albeit with a “golden parachute” severance package worth more than $20 million. No one cried for Carly then.
Nearly five years later, she’s back in the public eye again with her political campaign, after a stint as an economic advisor to Senator John McCain during his presidential campaign. McCain’s repaid the service by endorsing Fiorina in her Senate bid.
Can management talent translate smoothly into a political career? Other executives-turned-politicians, such as Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey and Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, made the transition from business to the Senate floor. The world is waiting to see if Carly Fiorina can make the grade in this challenge.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Follow the comments via RSS.