How Fiorina Destroyed the HP Way
I knew she screwed up HP big time, but not how much until I read this in the LA Times. HP still hasn't recovered. Damn, she's beyond insufferable!
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At Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina snuffed out a beloved tech culture
It’s hard to overestimate the impact that two young Stanford graduates, working in a small wooden garage behind a brown shingled house in 1939, had on the world of high technology. Without David Packard and William Hewlett, there would probably be no Silicon Valley. The pair were known not just for technical innovation and global success. They were accidental corporate chieftains who created an ethos of profitability, humility and collegiality that came to be known as “the HP Way.”
Their doors were not just always open; they didn’t even have doors. They enshrined the idea of “management by wandering.” “Bill and Dave would talk to anyone,” said Jerry Cashman, who worked as HP’s Work/Life manager from 1983 to 1999. “They would plop themselves down and say, ‘How’s it going?’”
The next two CEOs, John A. Young and Lewis Platt, rose through the ranks and ran the company the same way. Then, in 1999, Carly Fiorina arrived. Hewlett-Packard, arguably, has never fully recovered. She was the company’s first outside CEO, a whip-smart rock star of a businesswoman. She was hired to restore a sense of urgency to HP, which was becoming known more for its printers and cartridges than its innovative products.
At first, Fiorina seemed to embrace the founders’ philosophy, said people who worked closely with her. She carried a copy of Packard’s book, “The HP Way,” and even quoted from it. She updated the creed in an expensive ad campaign, creating something called “Garage rules” that got mixed reviews from employees and was brutally spoofed in a video by then-rival Sun Microsystems.
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http://www.latimes.com/local/abcarian/la-me-ra-carly-fiorina-trashed-the-hp-way-20150923-column.html
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