Candidate had a job-killing touch
That Carly Fiorina was a one-woman wrecking crew during her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard was never in doubt. But what follows is a tale that is now being picked up and distributed as the Republican Party seeks a nominee who combines business savvy and executive know-how.
Sadly, the former executive who most closely fits this particular bill also has exhibited the kind of corporate arrogance and blind certitude that came close to sinking what had been considered among the world’s best technology companies: HewlettPackard. At HP beginning in the mid-1990s, Fiorina was responsible for the ill-fated merger with Compaq, as well as for firing nearly 30,000 employees and sending tens of thousands of those jobs overseas. Never lacking in chutzpa, Fiorina celebrated the latter coup as an exercise in what she lamely termed “Right Shoring.”
Things went from bad to worse, to the extent that Arianna Packard, granddaughter of founder David Packard, joined Bill Hewlett, Walter Hewlett’s son, in a proxy fight to oust Fiorina. That move failed, but in 2005, Fiorina was given a $20 million dollar settlement just to go away. When she did, the HP stock price bounced back by 10 percent in a single day.
For better and for worse, Fiorina’s service at HP involved her in an even more damaging series of events ones involving the destruction of the once-mighty Bell Laboratories. In 1995, Fiorina took over as the head of corporate operations of the AT&T spinoff “Lucent Technologies” — which included the Bell Labs. It was here that the Fiorina nightmare truly began.
For those unfamiliar with Bell Labs/Lucent Technology, it was Ma Bell’s gift to America, a place where monopoly telephone service was balanced by a research business that employed more than 25,000 scientists, engineers, mathematicians and researchers. At the Bell Labs, research was considered an end unto itself, where, according to one executive, “you did something useful or you did something very beautiful.”
The realm of the former included such immensely important technology breakthroughs as the transistor, the silicon microprocessor, the laser, fiber optics, the communications satellite, and the UNIX, C++ and other key computer operating systems. In the pursuit of improved communications, serendipity occurred such as the confirmation of the “Big Bang” theory which won physicist Arno Penzias a 1978 Nobel Prize. Penzias, the now-retired Bell Labs vice president for research, put it best when he once said “one of the great luxuries of the Bell Labs is that we don’t always need to get it 100 percent right.”
Generally, the Labs got it very right, amassing more than 25,000 patents, including Alexander Graham Bell’s basic work on the telephone. But all this began changing in 1995, when a corporate team that included Fiorina descended on the Bell Labs New Jersey research center and pulled the Lab’s plug on pure research. According to Penzias, “today we have an environment where you live with business people.” A key member of that latter group was Fiorina, who led the housecleaning. She let the scientists at Lucent know that they had better start looking for ways to “productize” their research.
In 1997, Fiorina was appointed group president for global services, and two years later, she joined the HewlettPackard mother ship.
What Fiorina left behind at Lucent/Bell was a smoking ruin of what had been the world’s most important and productive research labs.
The importance of the Bell Labs cannot be overstated. It was an entity largely responsible for giving America the post-World War II boost. And it was the Bell Labs that made the U.S. the world technology leader, contributing mightily to the prosperity that Americans took for granted.
By insisting that every piece of research be tied to a product, Fiorina and her allies prevented a generation of scientists from looking out over the technology horizon to bring back the kind of benefits that have come from such seemingly fatherless technologies as the transistor, laser, and fiber optics. The correlation between Fiorina’s tenure at the Bell Labs and the decline of American technology is tragic and no coincidence.
Despite the millions being spent on campaign efforts designed to convince voters otherwise, Fiorina as a senator or American president would almost certainly be a disaster. Her election would sooner or later reveal her as a one-dimensional, corporate bottom-feeder whose only answer to fixing a corporate bottom line is to fire thousands of people rather than find and employ creative ways to use the immense collected brainpower to grow the American technology sector into renewed high-tech good times.
Republican voters, pay attention: Fiorina’s purge at Lucent and disastrous tenure at HP highlight her as the kind of retrograde business executive we cannot afford to elect to higher office. Fiorina has proved herself to be an uncreative corporate drone and likely a sheer catastrophe for American business and technology. She has not shown herself capable of mastering the long-term strategic thinking necessary to truly succeed in American technology.