“In January 2002, when I was still Editor of the technology business magazine Red Herring, I conceived an open letter from the editors of that magazine to Carly Fiorina, the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. It’s first line: ‘Dear Ms. Fiorina, Please Resign.’ Wednesday’s announcement that Fiorina had been pushed from the executive suite provided only the grimmest of pleasures. I was gratified to be proven right. But the company will probably never be what it once was. That’s as close to a tragedy as business offers,” Brad King and Michelle Delio write for TechnologyReview.com.
“The letter was written during the contentious debate over whether HP should purchase the ailing computer manufacturer, Compaq. I felt sure the merger was a terrible idea. But my beef with Fiorina went beyond the Compaq merger. She represented all that was wrong with celebrity CEOs and their fixation on Wall Street. More, her management style was horribly incongruous with the traditions of HP,” King and Delio write. “I love Hewlett-Packard because the company founded by Bill Hewlett and David Packard was egalitarian, technologically minded, and geeky. For decades, HP was the ideal of Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism to which all other companies aspired.”
“Just after the official announcement came down that CEO Carly Fiorina would be sacked, corks were popped and bottles were opened. There was little time for empathy. No pangs of sadness. Inside the company, workers openly celebrated their liberation from “Her Royal Horribleness,” a nickname bestowed upon Fiorina for her abrasive treatment of line workers. There was little love lost between the CEO and the 151,000 HP workers who have, almost consistently since 1999, made hating their boss a very personal, full-time mission. ‘When the news was officially announced this morning, people were dancing — literally dancing — around their cubicles,’ an employee in the business division writes in an email,” King and Delio write.
Full article here.
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Hewlett-Packard ousts CEO Carly Fiorina, and what was with that ‘Apple iPod by HP’ deal anyway? – February 09, 2005