Boy is she delirious with visions of grandeur.  Where is the innovation 
she's referring to?  What has HP done in the past 5 years that has been new 
or different?  Am I blind to it?  They make money from toner sales.  Their 
Non-Stop servers seem like good product, out on the leading edge for 
uptime, but probably a very small installed base.  Compaq brings some good 
storage products, but nothing revolutionary.  Their Unix line is good, but 
pretty generic.  PCs are PCs.  Agilent's not part of HP.  What am I missing?

John Lee


At 12:32 PM 10/10/06 +0000, J Dolliver wrote:
>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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