Carleton
(Carly) S. Fiorina was born Cara Carleton Sneed in Austin, Texas on
September 6, 1954. After dropping out of law school, she became an
AT&T sales rep. She moved up the company ladder and became the first
female officer in the Network Systems division. In 1998, she was put in
charge of Lucent's Global Service Provider division. A year later, she
was tapped as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. After the controversial merger
with Compac Computers didn’t meet expectations, Fiorina was forced to
resign. She then became a consultant for Republican candidates.
When
Carly Fiorina told her father, law professor Joseph Tyree Sneed III,
that she'd decided to drop out of law school after her first year at
UCLA, he shook his head and said he didn't think she'd amount to much.
Two decades later, she's been named the most powerful woman in American
business by Fortune magazine and in 1999 was named president/CEO of one
of the world's most important technology companies, Hewlett-Packard.
Carly,
her artist mother, Madelon Montross, and her two siblings moved
frequently thanks to her father's wide-ranging career. She attended five
different high schools, including one in Ghana. In college, she studied
medieval history and philosophy, and after trying law school, she
bounced from job to job, working as a receptionist, teaching English in
Italy, and finally signing on as a sales rep at AT&T at age 25. In
the coming years, she would earn an MBA from the University of Maryland
and a MS degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Interested
in the developing field of network communications, she surprised her
co-workers by joining the male-dominated Network Systems division. At
age 35, Carly became the division's first female officer, and five years
later was named head of North American sales. She combined an
appreciation of new technologies with powerful sales instincts, which
won the attention of top brass at AT&T. In 1996, the company decided
to spin off its Western Electric and Bell Labs divisions into a new
company. Carly was tagged to spearhead the effort. Under her guidance,
the spin-off, dubbed Lucent, became one of the most successful IPOs
(Initial Public Offerings) in U.S. history, raising $3 billion.
Carly’s
first marriage ended in divorce. In 1985, she married AT&T
executive Frank Fiorina who put his own career on the slow track in
order to support hers. He predicted early on that she would run a big
company someday, and he pledged to help her. Retired in 1998, he devotes
his time to yachting, caring for their dogs, and accompanying Fiorina
on business trips.
As chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Hewlett-Packard (HP), a
technology company worth $72 billion, Carly Fiorina is the most powerful
woman in American business. Many give credit to the savvy businesswoman
for leading the technology titan into the twenty-first century. In 2002
Fiorina cemented her reputation as a risk taker when she engineered a
controversial merger between HP and
Computers. After expanding her
empire, Fiorina was sitting at the helm of the second largest computer
company in the world. By the mid-2000s, however, given HP's shaky
numbers, critics wondered if Fiorina's reign would continue.
Regardless, her role in history as a trailblazer would remain. When she
joined Hewlett-Packard in 1999, Fiorina became the only woman to head a
large, publicly held company in the United States.
Steers toward business
Businesswoman Carly Fiorina was born Cara Carleton Sneed on September 6,
1954, in Austin, Texas. Her unique name was the result of family
tradition. All the male members of the Sneed family who were named
Carleton died while serving in the Civil War (1861–1865). To honor
them, one child in each subsequent generation was named either Carleton
(if a boy) or Cara Carleton (if a girl). Fiorina's father, Joseph
Sneed, was a lawyer and at one time served as deputy attorney general
under President Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994). He also served for
more than thirty years as an appeals court judge in San Francisco,
California. Fiorina's mother, Madelon, was an abstract painter. In
2003, during a ceremony honoring her father's longstanding career,
Fiorina credited her parents for inspiring her to excel. "In times
of hardship and uncertainty," she observed, as quoted on the
OCE Public Information Office
Web site, "people need a strong internal
compass to find their
way." Fiorina specifically thanked her father for "always
being my true north."
"Progress is not made by the cynics and doubters. It is made by
those who believe everything is possible."
Although Fiorina was raised primarily in the San Francisco Bay area, her
father's job caused the family to move quite a bit. She attended at
least five high schools all over the world, including
Ghana (in Africa)
and London, England. Fiorina eventually returned to California to attend
Stanford University, located in Palo Alto. Strangely enough,
Hewlett-Packard's corporate headquarters are located in Palo Alto,
and the future CEO worked in HP's shipping department during a
summer break from college. After graduating with a degree in medieval
history and philosophy, Fiorina decided to follow in her father's
footsteps. She entered law school at the University of California at Los
Angeles in 1976. After one semester, however, she dropped out, deciding
that a career in law was not for her.
Do You Want to Be Carly Fiorina?
Carly Fiorina has graced the top of
Fortune
magazine's annual list of the most powerful women in business
since the ranking was launched in 1998. But in October of 2003, when the
magazine polled the other honorees and asked them whether they would
like to be in Fiorina's shoes, the answer was consistently
"no." Many seemed uncomfortable with the word
power.
As Ann Fudge, CEO of Young & Rubicam (and number 46 on the list),
told
Fortune,
"We need to redefine power!" And according to Jenny Ming,
president of Old Navy, "Power is in your face and aggressive.
I'm not like that."
Definitions aside, according to
Fortune,
by the mid-2000s the trend was that women were regularly being offered
positions of power but were not accepting them. And more and more women
were leaving their top-level positions or taking short- or long-term
breaks. One reason cited was that women were not willing to sacrifice
their personal lives, especially time with their children, in order to
work a staggering number of hours at their companies. As Jamie Gorelick,
former vice chairman of Fannie Mae, commented to
Fortune
, the "secret is that women demand a lot more satisfaction in
their lives than men do."
Of course it makes it a lot easier to devote time to a career if one
spouse stays at home. Interestingly enough, according to
Fortune,
more than one-third of the women who appeared on the list in 2003 had
husbands who were stay-at-home dads. In fact, Carly Fiorina's
husband Frank, a former AT&T executive, took an early retirement in
1998 to help focus his energies on his wife's career.
Not only were women turning down or leaving upper level positions in the
business world, but business schools were having a difficult time
attracting female students. According to a 2002 study by Simmons College
of over four thousand teenagers, only 9 percent of girls interviewed
expressed an interest in going into business. In addition, women made up
only 36 percent of students heading toward a master's degree in
business administration (
MBA). As Judy Rodin, president of the
University of Pennsylvania, explained, young women on her campus
regularly commented that "You [career-focused] women work too
hard. You're too strung out." Considering that Carly
Fiorina starts her day every morning at 4:00, maybe they are right.
Fortune
did offer some hope. Young men appeared to be changing their attitudes
toward the business world. They, like women, seemed to want a balance
between their personal lives and their careers. According to Brenda
Barnes, who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management in Chicago, her
students have told her that they saw their parents "dedicating
themselves to their companies" and that they are not willing to
"give their lives over to their jobs." Women executives
see this as good news. They predict that if business attitudes change,
equality between men and women in the top business spots may become a
reality. That reality may be some time coming, however, considering that
in 2003 only 8 percent of the top level jobs in corporate America were
held by women.
Not sure what to do, Fiorina tried her hand at a number of jobs. She even
taught English in Bologna, Italy. It was while working as a receptionist
at a New York brokerage firm that her interest in business
was sparked. Fiorina decided to go back to school to get a
master's degree in business administration (MBA), and in 1980 she
graduated from the University of Maryland. Fresh out of graduate school,
Fiorina landed a job at the telecommunications giant AT&T as a sales
representative. She was quickly promoted to the position of commercial
account executive, and was responsible for selling long distance telephone
service to federal agencies in the U.S. government.
Lights up Lucent, then snagged by HP
Fiorina's aggressive sales record did not go unnoticed by her
employers, who decided that she was definitely management material. As a
result, in 1988 she was sent to the prestigious
Sloan School of Management
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to earn a master of science
degree in business. While at Sloan, Fiorina met the head of
AT&T's Network Systems Group, a manufacturing division of the
company that was viewed as sluggish and outdated. Against the advice of
colleagues, she decided to transfer to Network Systems, even though it was
a low profile area and the move seemed almost certain to stall her career.
However, quite the opposite happened. In 1995 Fiorina was appointed as the
first woman officer at Network Systems when she was put in charge of North
American sales. She became instrumental in carving out new markets for
AT&T in the Far East, well before it became commonplace for U.S.
businesses to expand on a global scale.
In 1995 AT&T decided to spin off into three separate companies and
Fiorina was at the center of the whirlwind. One company would focus on
long distance, while
NCR Corporation would be the computer company and
Lucent Technologies would concentrate on telecommunications and networking
equipment, essential for running the Internet. Network Systems was folded
into Lucent, and Fiorina was put in charge of revamping the new company.
She coordinated Lucent's $3 billion initial public offering (IPO),
which is the offering of stock on the open market to the public for the
first time. She was also responsible for creating Lucent's flashy
marketing image, including its red swirl logo. Lucent quickly became a
leader in the networking industry, and Fiorina was given most of the
credit. In 1998 she became president of Lucent's Global Service
Provider Business, and
by year's end Lucent had chalked up $19 billion in revenue. That
same year Fiorina was placed at the top of
Fortune
magazine's list of the most powerful women in business.
Other corporations soon took notice of the knowledgeable young
professional, including Hewlett-Packard, the grandfather of all computer
companies. In July of 1999, HP announced that it had hired Fiorina to be
its president and chief executive officer (CEO). The move was remarkable
for several reasons. One, HP was a family-owned business, and for the
first time it was hiring a president from outside its own ranks. Second,
the corporation became the first large U.S. company to place a woman in
charge. Third, Fiorina was breaking into Silicon Valley, a region south of
San Francisco where there is a concentration of high-tech industries, and
until Fiorina came along, the industry had been strictly male-dominated.
Although Fiorina was sad to leave AT&T after almost twenty years, she
explained to
Electronic News,
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me. Hewlett-Packard
is a company of great accomplishment and even greater potential.... I will
strive to strike the right balance between reinforcing HP's values
and working to reinvent its business."
A house divided
Since its formation in 1939 by Bill Hewlett (1913–2001) and Dave
Packard (1912–1996), Hewlett-Packard had grown into one of the
preeminent leaders in the computer industry, noted primarily for cornering
the printer market. But by the late 1990s it was starting to lose ground,
especially to personal computer (PC) giant IBM. The company looked to
Fiorina to help it reenergize. As Sam Ginn, a member of HP's board
of directors told
Electronic News,
"The board unanimously agreed that she is quite simply the ideal
candidate to leverage HP's core strengths in the rapidly changing
information-systems industry and to lead this great company well into the
new millennium."
Fiorina lost no time cleaning house. She streamlined operations by
combining several different divisions into fewer, more manageable units.
She also shook up the HP sales staff, telling them to shape up or leave
the company. This was a harsh mandate, but at the same time Fiorina was
also known for her exceptional leadership skills and for maintaining a
loyal employee following. By 2001, however, analysts were
wondering if HP's ambitious new CEO had been too aggressive. True,
Fiorina had struck some very lucrative deals with Ford Motor Company and
Delta Airlines to purchase exclusively from HP, but the
corporation's PC sales were still lagging and there had been no
major inroads into the world of e-business, as promised. HP remained
optimistic. As board member George Keyworth explained to
USA Today,
"In the early summer of 1999, when we were interviewing Carly, we
discussed it would take a minimum of three years to turn things around and
there would be lots of ups and downs. We are absolutely behind
her."
The board was divided, however, when Fiorina made a daring announcement in
September of 2001. In a further effort to overtake IBM, she proposed to
buy Compaq Computers, another faltering leader in the PC industry. The
proposed merger could cost up to $25 billion, but Fiorina claimed that the
combined assets of the two companies would create an information
technology dynamo. Members of both the Hewlett and Packard families balked
at the idea, and initially refused to go along with the deal. They
eventually relented, and on May 3, 2002, Fiorina successfully engineered
the $19 billion consolidation.
Carly Fioina (left) shakes hands with the chief executive of
Compaq, Michael Capellas. Hewlett-Packard purchased Compaq in
2002.
AP/Wide World Photo. Reproduced by permission.
Carly claims victory with Compaq
A year-and-a-half after the merger, Fiorina was claiming victory. She told
Fortune
magazine that "the strategy has been vindicated." She also
announced that HP "leads in every product category, every
geography, and every customer segment in which we participate." The
company did look different, and it launched a new ad campaign with the tag
line "Everything is possible." It was also branching into
new consumer electronics markets, like Tablet PCs and MP3 players, hoping
to give new industry leader Dell Computers a run for their money.
But according to business analysts the numbers told a different story. In
October of 2003, writer Stephanie Smith observed on the CNN Web site that
the "new HP looks a lot like the old HP," and revealed that
80 percent of the company's $4.4 billion profit still came from
printer sales. In addition, the morale of HP seemed to be suffering. By
January of 2004 seven of HP's top managers had left the company.
Some
retired, some migrated to the competition, and at least one quit suddenly
and without notice. Fiorina remained unfazed, telling
Fortune
that "only 1.7 percent of executives at the vice president level
and above have left HP since the merger. That's a pretty small
percentage."
Numbers aside, there is no doubt that Fiorina has ranked as a visionary.
While at AT&T she helped usher in the era of global business; at
Hewlett-Packard she has been at the forefront of new technological
ventures. Fiorina has also helped HP become a leader in giving. She
launched HP's Technology for Teaching program, which each year
awards $10 million in technology grants to U.S. schools from kindergarten
through college level. She has also established programs in other
countries, including India, to "help bridge the digital divide
between technology empowered and technology-excluded communities,"
as quoted in
PR Newswire.
As a result, in November of 2003 Hewlett-Packard was honored by the
international nonprofit
humanitarian organization Concern Worldwide for
"its commitment to spearheading educational initiatives around the
world."
footnote:
Credit to: Encyclopedia World Biography
& bio.com
