I believe she really missed the mark with this comment, "Second thing:
We returned HP to its roots of innovation. " by trying to change the
definition of what HP's roots really were.

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On
Behalf Of J Dolliver
Sent: Tuesday, October 10, 2006 5:32 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [HP3000-L] It was the worst of times for the HP3000. tough
choices

Carly Fiorina speak out.....

Exerpts from her interview and book. I am sure it will be on my book
list "NOT".

A lasting legacy
What do you think are the best and the worst things that you did at HP?
I think the best things I did for HP have to do with the fundamentals of
its transformation. I would say there were four things. First, we made
the decision that HP was going to lead again. And that meant we had to
undertake the merger with Compaq. That merger, undertaken in
extraordinarily difficult times, provided the foundation for leadership.
And by the time I left, we were already number one or number two of
every business in which we competed. It is a foundation upon which
others have now built, to their credit. Fundamental. It established the
trajectory of performance and leadership for the business.
Second thing: We returned HP to its roots of innovation. When the
technology company called Hewlett-Packard doesn't even show up in the
top 25 innovators in the world, which was the case when I arrived, it's
not innovating anymore. By the time I left, it was 11 patents a day. It
was number three in the world. That's a big deal.
Did the genetic material brought into the company with Compaq accelerate
that?
Well, I think it accelerated it, but I don't want to say that the merger
alone was the cause of that.
No, HP was a great institution...

Yeah, but it was atrophying. It was neglected.
Everybody at HP focused on incrementalism. And if you're only focused on
incrementalism, you cannot innovate. So it took a fundamental
reorientation of people's mindsets as well as peoples' metrics to
reinvigorate our innovative capacity, which is fundamental to a
technology company.
Third: HP had become a bureaucracy. It needed to be a meritocracy. And
that too takes really hard work over an extended period of time. What
does a bureaucracy do? It becomes slow-moving, insular, internally
focused. What's a meritocracy about? It's focused on performance
competitively measured - huge, hugely important.
And I think the final thing - and these aren't in any particular order -
we became a customer-focused business again. When I arrived at HP, we
couldn't measure customer sat. Customers would say to me, "I don't know
who to call; they never call me." We had 150 brands. We had 87 different
product lines that never talked to each other.
This was not a customer-focused business. And in my tenure, it became a
customer-focused business. Not only did it become a customer-focused
business, but the way the company thinks about customers, total customer
experience, is still deeply embedded in the fabric of the business.
Those are big things. Now I could go on and on about, you know, in the
PC business we made hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of
investments over three years to build a direct distribution engine that
ultimately, clearly competes with Dell (Charts), despite great
skepticism that we could do it. I mean, I could go on into specifics, if
you like, in every single product line. But the big picture is the
strategy to lead and the merger with Compaq; innovation, customer focus
and a performance-based, customer-based culture.
So now to the worst things. I think my mistakes - and I made them - were
several. First, I made mistakes about people. And sometimes when I say
that, people think, oh, well that's not a big deal. That's a big deal. A
leader's most important set of choices are about people. And I made some
mistakes in judgment about people.
In some cases, I'm very candid in the book. I put the wrong people in
certain jobs and left them there too long. I underestimated certain
people. I overestimated other people. I didn't get all my people choices
wrong, but I got some wrong.
The second thing I would say is clearly I should have been more focused
and more effective at upgrading the capability in the boardroom, and I
didn't get it done. And by the time I was firmly focused on getting it
done, they got me done.

You make it clear that from the day you started meeting with the board,
you realized this was a weird, fairly dysfunctional board.

Initially I couldn't do it because they had given me my mandate. Then we
went through the whole merger, and board members are a political
negotiation, who gets to sit where. And by the time we were in a
position to deal with it, I didn't deal with it aggressively enough, and
then it got away from me.
And I think the third thing I would say is, I would do it all again, but
I underestimated how incredibly difficult change would be at
Hewlett-Packard. It was extraordinarily difficult and painful for
everyone, including me. I didn't appreciate the depth of emotion around
the first layoff. I mean, I knew there would be emotion around it, but I
really thought that given the downturn that we were in, people would see
it fundamentally as necessary. So that emotion makes a big difference in
a company.
By the way, when I say I would do it again, I am absolutely convinced,
despite the fact that those changes were extraordinary, tough and
painful, they had to be done, and the company is stronger and better for
it. And I think employees at Hewlett-Packard now enjoy being part of the
leading technology company in the world.

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