Could Fiorina Win the Republican Nomination?

clintl said:

I've never thought Trump would win the nomination, for one big reason - he's disliked by even more Republicans than he's liked. And eventually, even if he holds his lead for a while, and sticks around to the end, the best case for Trump is that it's going to narrow down to Trump vs. someone else. And I think it's a good bet that "Someone else" will win the nomination in the end.

Which brings me to Fiorina. We've seen this before, in 2012 - outsider business person rockets to the top of the GOP polls for a brief moment, then fades away as soon as everyone figures out he's an empty suit. Fiorina seems qualitatively different, however. She's not crazy. She's smart. She seems to be doing her homework and making a serious effort to understand and articulate realistic policies. (More so than the establishment candidates, I might add.) And she's the one person who has been willing to stand up to Trump and come away unscathed. Actually, with an enhanced status. She's won two debates handily so far - so she's comfortable with that, and winning two in a row means it's not a fluke.

I wouldn't vote for her for anything, based on her corporate record at Lucent and HP. But it looks to me that she's the kind of "outsider" candidate that wouldn't scare the GOP establishment. It doesn't look like she's going to be prone to making any big mistakes. And none of the candidates with elective experience seem to be making a connection with GOP voters at all - they're all in single digits.

What does everyone think - is Fiorina now a very plausible possibility to win the Republican nomination? I think she is.

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Carly Fiorina is the new "it" candidate in the Republican presidential field, following a second straight sterling debate performance at the Ronald Reagan presidential library Wednesday night.

But there was a moment in the debate that previewed a major potential weakness for Fiorina. It came when moderator Jake Tapper noted that Donald Trump had said Fiorina "ran HP into the ground" during her time as CEO. Fiorina responded, "I led Hewlett Packard through a very difficult time, the worst technology recession in 25 years," adding: "We had to make tough choices, and in doing so, we saved 80,000 jobs, went on to grow to 160,000 jobs."

Trump -- and Tapper -- largely let the issue drop. But Fiorina's past political history suggests that her struggles at HP could be a campaign killer.


In 2010, Fiorina was running surprisingly close to California Sen. Barbara Boxer (D), who was struggling in a strong election cycle for Republicans nationally. Then, Boxer ran this ad focused on Fiorina's time at the helm of HP.

The commercial notes that Fiorina laid off 30,000 workers at HP while feathering her own nest (the ad's narrator says she tripled her salary) and buying a "million-dollar yacht" and "five corporate jets." It went up on TV in the middle of September and effectively ended Fiorina's chances.

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whistlelock said:

I don't think so. The disaster that was her tenure as the CEO of HP is too much for her to make it to the end.

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ElaineA said:

I don't disagree with this, but I'm also amazed this is the reason many people give for not backing her, while simultaneously ignoring Trump's 4 corporate bankruptcies. (Not that you were, whistlelock, but people I hear talking about how great Trump is.)

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Vince524 said:

I don't think it's fair to say she claimed victim status. Sure, Trump's attack on her gave her a great chance to respond, but she didn't respond in a 'victim' way.

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Fair?

Don said:

Compared to the rest of the Republican clown car, she's a genius. If she were a liberal, the spin on her tenure at HP would be entirely different. She was inexperienced and got caught in the dot-com bubble, a combination that killed the careers of a whole bunch of people who have since been rehabilitated. That said, she has a better understanding of business and economics than anybody running for the red or blue team. Good360 is one of the most efficient charities in the US, and it's model is one of the most sensible out there.

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As a now-official presidential candidate, there’s no way Carly Fiorina can ignore her tenure at Hewlett-Packard, which she ran as CEO for six tumultuous years before the board ousted her in 2005. By that time, the company’s stock had lost about half its value and tens of thousands of people had lost their jobs.


Fiorina took H-P’s helm in 1999 at the height of the tech boom. She left after the boom went bust. It seems likely that H-P, a giant in office equipment, would have faced huge challenges no matter who was running the company. But most observers—including the company’s board—have concluded that she made a bad situation worse than it might otherwise have been.


Right away, she began planning to restructure the company, and took heat for laying off thousands of workers. The decision to spin-off a division that made technical testing equipment into what became Agilent Technologies predated her arrival. She managed that spinoff in a successful IPO.


She quickly turned her attention to remaking Hewlett-Packard. The plan was to directly take on IBM as an end-to-end, computing-and-services business. One of her first moves was to announce the acquisition of the tech services division of Pricewaterhousecoopers for $14 billion. When Wall Street balked, she withdrew the offer. After the dotcom crash, IBM picked up the division for $4 billion.
She next set her sights on Compaq Computer in 2002 for $19 billion. That decision continues to haunt both Fiorina and H-P.


Taking on Compaq was controversial from the get-go. A bruising-but-unsuccessful proxy battle ensued. Walter Hewlett, a board member and son of company co-founder Walter Hewlett, vehemently opposed the deal. Outside observers and some big shareholders that it would dilute the company’s core, profitable printer business. It did much more than that, with H-P’s results sinking every quarter. Eventually, it led to 17,000 more people being laid off as Dell Computer, much more highly focused on the PC market, came to dominate.
Upon her exit, H-P gave Fiorina what was widely considered a “golden parachute” worth about $40 million.


When she was finally ousted, the board insisted that it wasn’t because of corporate results, but because of her “management style.” Fiorina, who was often described as imperious and distant, took a lot of criticism for giving herself big bonuses even while laying people off, and for hitting the speaking circuit even while the company was in a tailspin.


That presents perhaps Fiorina’s greatest challenge, since it’s her record as a manager that she is now citing as a reason to elect her president. An even greater challenge? The fact that so many lists of history’s “worst CEOs” include her name.

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c.e.lawson said:

I really like Fiorina as a candidate, and I will very likely vote for her if given the opportunity. She is not only a good debater (meaning quick on her feet, well-spoken and concise in her responses), but she gave the most detailed and substantive answers to policy questions. She has a strength in her demeanor that is presidential. (As a matter of fact, even my husband, a Bernie supporter, said she seemed the most presidential of any of the repubs at the varsity debate.) She's obviously very smart. She has global connections.

As far as her tenure at HP, I'm going to post a couple of links which give a different perspective on her performance. I do think the media is biased against her, as are some of the writers of articles about her HP work (i.e. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld), and I think we should at least be aware there are knowledgeable people out there with more positive views.

One is from The Wall Street Journal : http://www.wsj.com/articles/ceo-fiorina-fought-the-good-fight-1439939185

CEO Fiorina Fought the Good Fight
No big-tech chief executive created value between 1999 and 2005. And Carly was one of them.

From the Dallas Morning News Opinion Column by a Hewlett Packard former senior VP: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/l...no-is-carly-fiorina-presidential-material.ece

And another from Breitbart which has some details not seen in the other two: http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...ecutive-defends-carly-fiorinas-record-as-ceo/

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“Hewlett-Packard was a disaster. Lucent, the company she was at before Hewlett-Packard, was a disaster. These were two disastrous reigns,” said Donald Trump in an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation.


For all Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail, he has a point here. Under Fiorina’s reign at HP shareholders took a beating. During her tenure, HP shares lost 42% while the broader market slid just 6%. The day she was fired in February 2005, the stock popped 7%.


Fiorina joined HP as CEO in 1999 and her campaign website lists a raft of accomplishments at the company, saying she ”doubled revenues; more than quadrupled its growth rate; tripled the rate of innovation, with 11 patents a day.”


Those figures are impressive at first glance, but also largely misleading. While Fiorina did double revenues to nearly $90 billion during her tenure, it was almost entirely because of the highly controversial acquisition of Compaq Computer in 2002. The merger, a bet on personal computers just as their sales were starting to slide, faced strong opposition and Fiorina had to launch a proxy battle to win approval, pitting her against the son of co-founder William Hewlett.


What’s more, 15 years later the saga isn’t over. HP is currently in the process of splitting its legacy computer and printers business off from the rest of the company and this week announced plans to lay off another 30,000 people under current CEO Meg Whitman (another wannabe politician who tried to leverage corporate success at eBay into the governorship of California).


“I managed HP through a very difficult time. Many tech companies while I was CEO also lost half their value,” Fiorina said in May, her typical defense when confronted with the hard numbers on value destruction during her tenure. She’s right, to a point. The Nasdaq fell 34% during that time as the dot-com bubble burst, but even reeling peers like IBM (-27%) and Microsoft (-36%) didn’t fall as far as HP, while Dell managed to gain 12%.

Forbes

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Carly Fiorina was ready when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked her to respond to criticism about her record at Hewlett-Packard during last week’s Republican debate.


Looking intently into the camera, Mrs. Fiorina said that a prominent venture capitalist who pushed for her firing at Hewlett-Packard in 2005 had recently taken out a full-page newspaper ad saying that he had been wrong to do so and that she had been “a terrific C.E.O.’’
What Mrs. Fiorina did not mention was that the ad — which cost roughly $140,000 — was paid for by the “super PAC” supporting her presidential candidacy. The same group, Carly for America, has gathered video footage of the venture capitalist, Thomas J. Perkins, praising Mrs. Fiorina, and it could be used in television or Internet ads in the weeks ahead.


The moves are part of an extensive effort by Mrs. Fiorina and her supporters to redefine her rocky business reputation and fend off attacks on her as an unfit and heartless executive. Such accusations helped doom her 2010 Senate campaign in California. Democrats called her “Carly Fail-orina” and the incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer depicted her as the face of corporate greed.


While some analysts say the Compaq merger saved the company and HP’s planned split has to do with years of bad decisions involving a series of chief executives, others say the latest saga began with Mrs. Fiorina’s grand acquisitions, which never yielded the profits or economies of scale she and her successors anticipated.


“She had a very mixed tenure,” said George Colony, chief executive of Forrester, a technology research firm. “The culture she tried to change spit her out, eventually. I’d put her at the top of the bottom third of C.E.O.s.”


Mrs. Fiorina defends her tenure, armed with statistics that sounded like a PowerPoint presentation. The support of Mr. Perkins, a former HP board member and founder of one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, could prove critical in making her argument stick.
“We doubled the size of the company,” Mrs. Fiorina said in last week’s debate. “We quadrupled its top-line growth rate. We quadrupled its cash flow. We tripled its rate of innovation.”


But much of that growth resulted from the Compaq acquisition. Profits as a percentage of revenue in the six years Mrs. Fiorina served as chief executive declined about 40 percent. The stock price fell sharply. Mrs. Fiorina blames the burst of the dot-com bubble for the drop, but HP shares fell by more than the stocks of competitors like Dell, IBM, Intel and Microsoft.

Mrs. Fiorina’s political rivals have also highlighted that she ushered in a period of corporate scandal, including public clashes with members of the Hewlett family. Fired in 2005, she left with more than $42 million in severance, stock options and pension.

New York Times

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c.e.lawson said:

I really like Fiorina as a candidate, and I will very likely vote for her if given the opportunity. She is not only a good debater (meaning quick on her feet, well-spoken and concise in her responses), but she gave the most detailed and substantive answers to policy questions. She has a strength in her demeanor that is presidential. (As a matter of fact, even my husband, a Bernie supporter, said she seemed the most presidential of any of the repubs at the varsity debate.) She's obviously very smart. She has global connections.

As far as her tenure at HP, I'm going to post a couple of links which give a different perspective on her performance. I do think the media is biased against her, as are some of the writers of articles about her HP work (i.e. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld), and I think we should at least be aware there are knowledgeable people out there with more positive views.

One is from The Wall Street Journal : http://www.wsj.com/articles/ceo-fiorina-fought-the-good-fight-1439939185

CEO Fiorina Fought the Good Fight
No big-tech chief executive created value between 1999 and 2005. And Carly was one of them.

From the Dallas Morning News Opinion Column by a Hewlett Packard former senior VP: http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/l...no-is-carly-fiorina-presidential-material.ece

And another from Breitbart which has some details not seen in the other two: http://www.breitbart.com/big-govern...ecutive-defends-carly-fiorinas-record-as-ceo/

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Forbes said:

In the spring of 1999, Lucent Technology’s star executive Carly Fiorina pulled off yet another coup—or so it appeared. A tiny start-up called PathNet agreed to buy huge amounts of fiber-optic gear from Lucent, a deal worth at least $440 million and potentially as much as $2.1 billion. The agreement Fiorina negotiated “potentially represents the single largest fiber supply agreement to a network operator in the U.S,” according to a triumphant press release.

While it was unclear how a tiny company like PathNet, with barely 100 employees and all of $1.6 million in annual revenue, could swing such as massive purchase, Wall Street didn’t seem to care about such details. The day following the announcement Lucent’s stock jumped 3%.

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Yet Fiorina’s campaign biography quickly skates over the stint that made her a star: her three-year run as a top executive at Lucent Technologies. That seems puzzling, since unlike her decidedly mixed record at HP, Fiorina’s tenure at Lucent has all the outward trappings of success.

Lucent reported a stream of great results beginning in 1996, after Fiorina, who had been a vice-president at AT&T t , helped oversee the company’s spin-off from Ma Bell. By the time she left to run HP in 1999 revenues were up 58%, to $38 billion. Net income went from a small loss to $4.8 billion profit. Giddy investors bid up Lucent’s stock 10-fold. And unlike HP, where Fiorina instituted large layoffs—a fact Senator Boxer loves to mention whenever possible—Lucent added 22,000 jobs during Fiorina’s tenure.

Dig under the surface, however, and the story grows more complicated and less flattering. The Lucent that Fiorina walked away from, taking with her $65 million in performance-linked pay, was not at all what it appeared. Nor were several of her division’s biggest sales, including the giant PathNet deal.

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Fiorina says in her autobiography that she pushed back against the pressure for short-term growth at any cost, and two former Lucent collegues with whom she remains friendly back her up. On the other hand, this 2001 Fortune story, which described Lucent’s irresponsible growth habits, cites sources saying Fiorina made it known that Wall Street would generously reward companies that emphasized and delivered robust revenue growth. And an executive who sat across the table from Fiorina in a big vendor financing negotiation, when asked this week about what he remembers of the bargaining, described Fiorina as being dead set on chalking up a huge sale. He adds: “The press release was always very important to her.”

Whatever the exact extent of Fiorina’s role, Lucent was soon sucked in deep, making big loans to sketchy customers. In an SEC document filed just after Fiorina’s departure, the company revealed that it had $7 billion in loan commitments to customers — many of them financially unstable start-ups building all manner of new networks — of which Lucent had dispensed $1.6 billion.

Such vendor financing deals would have much the same impact on the telecom industry that sub-prime mortgages eventually had on the housing industry. In both cases public companies extended loans to customers who were gambling that the good times would keep rolling (and who were especially glad to make those bets with the lenders’ money). In both cases the loans helped puff up lenders’ short-term financial results and stock prices. In both cases the market inevitably turned and the pile of debt collapsed. (PathNet, after taking on another slug of vendor debt from Nortel, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2001 as the industry collapsed.)

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Regardless, once Fiorina left for HP in July, 1999, Lucent’s dicey debt and other worries became someone else’s problem. Fortunately for her, based on Lucent’s sky-high stock price, Fiorina’s stock and options were still worth a mint. (A total of $85 million, she says.) HP gave her $65 million worth of restricted stock to compensate her for the Lucent stock and options she was leaving behind.

Fiorina likes to point out that she left $20 million on the table. Of course, that’s using her numbers and assuming she would have cashed out her Lucent stock and options at once. If she had held onto the stock and options instead of selling them, that $85 million would have evaporated.

That’s what happened to most Lucent investors. Soon after Fiorina left, the company began to collapse. Eventually its shares crashed to less than $1 and in 2006 the company merged with Alcatel ALU .

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clintl said:

I think that's the most pertinent fact about her record. No other company ever hired her as CEO.

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In 2001, when Hewlett-Packard's then-CEO Carly Fiorina announced that the technology giant proposed to merge with Compaq Computer Corp., she set off a firestorm of controversy. Michael Dell, CEO of rival Dell Computer, famously called it "the dumbest deal of the decade," and Walter Hewlett, the son of one of the company's founders, mounted an aggressive proxy fight to prevent the corporate marriage from being consummated. Stockholders as well as the media were fiercely divided as to the wisdom of the move.

Not any longer. Six years later, after Fiorina's acrimonious 2005 departure — which many attributed largely to the merger — and the promotion of former NCR head Mark Hurd to lead HP, the consensus is that the merger was indeed a good idea.

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When HP and Compaq announced a $25 billion merger agreement 10 years ago this week on Sept. 3, 2001, it shocked the industry and sent apprehension and anxiety rippling through the channel as naysayers predicted a very painful and even disastrous integration.

Big technology mergers weren't thought of very fondly by the channel, and many HP and Compaq partners were fearful the proposed merger would put both IT vendors in jeopardy and also cause a major disruption to VARs' businesses. Channel partners weren't the only ones concerned; the value of the deal fell $5 billion the day after the announcement as investors soured on the news.

But fast-forward a decade, and solution providers say the historic merger was a surprising success and ultimately helped their businesses. And the bold move ultimately produced what the two companies promised – a worldwide technology powerhouse with top revenue positions in servers, PC and printers (go here for the official HP-Compaq merger press release).

"You look back now, and Carly [Fiorina, former HP CEO] was right – there was a lot of synergy between the two companies," Tommy Wald, CEO of White Glove Technologies in Austin, Texas, said. "The merger worked out well in retrospect. I think they turned the combined company into a strong channel company, which is what we were all concerned about as partners."

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Since the outbreak of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Navy and NATO allies have focused on so-called asymmetric threats, like counter-piracy and counter-terror missions, where a heavily armed force confronts a less developed one. Now faced with a sophisticated and aggressive Russia, NATO needs to sharpen its skills in areas such as amphibious operations, and antisubmarine and anti-air warfare.

"We are trying to get NATO, after a period of 12 years of being engaged in Iraq and Afghanistan … to begin to focus on the more high-end naval warfare, which is amphibious operations and carrier operations," Ferguson said.

"What Russia's activities have done is brought into sharp relief the necessity to maintain naval forces at the high end of readiness and warfighting capability," he said.

In describing the security situation in Europe, Ferguson detailed a laundry list of challenges that has transformed U.S. Sixth Fleet.

"It's dynamic, it's volatile and it has changed very rapidly," Ferguson said. "A year ago we were talking about the Sochi Olympics. We were talking about counter-terrorism and Russia as a strategic partner. In the intervening time we've seen the invasion and annexation of Crimea; we've seen the incursion into Eastern Ukraine; we've seen the rise of ISIL and the Syrian situation; and you see continuing turmoil in Libya."

Ferguson said the turmoil in Syria and North Africa presents another vexing issue: the flood of migrants fleeing failing states.

"You're seeing migration flows — a doubling, tripling of migrants coming out of these conflict zones and from states in danger of failing." he said. "In the southeast we see violent extremism [and] violent extremist groups operating on the border of a NATO ally: Turkey. You see the instability in the Levant, which stretches all the way across North Africa. We're worried about foreign fighter flows coming into Europe from that area, threatening partners [and U.S. interests]."

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c.e.lawson said:

There are also claims by people in the know that the company was stagnant, the board dysfunctional, and a new vision was needed to pull HP out of the decline. She had the balls to implement change, and it seems that change allowed the company to survive, when many others did not survive.

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blacbird said:

I think I'm moderately safe in opining it won't be Huckabee

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NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Conventional wisdom suggests that it takes an experienced politician to be President of the United States. With several folks who aren't known best as politicians -- like former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina and Dr. Ben Carson, a surgeon -- entering the 2016 election, let's reexamine that wisdom.

Without endorsing Fiorina or her candidacy specifically, a CEO President could be just what our country needs.

There are many characteristics that make a good CEO that would translate well to the Oval Office:


-- Successful CEOs build their businesses by empowering employees and making people feel valued. When people are confident and empowered, they can accomplish great things. When people are dependent and see no future, the company is doomed. A CEO-President would be best served by empowering and energizing the team around them -- as well as the American people.

-- Successful CEOs are inclusive. It has been long recognized that exclusion, in all of its forms, is bad for business. Good leaders manage diversity in all of its forms. Businesses prosper most effectively when we are inclusive of multiple stakeholders who have different points of view. A CEO-President would consider all points of view before making decisions.


-- Successful CEOs don't lose site of the big picture: return on investment. Shareholders and boards of directors bring a variety of viewpoints to the leader of a company. Yet, they are unified in demanding a return on investment. A CEO-President wouldn't lose sight of what's really important in the position.


-- Successful CEOs look at spending as investments. Capital investments are necessary to move business forward. But not all investments are good ones. A CEO-President wouldn't denounce all taxes as bad, which would be like a business no longer investing in itself, but would figure out which investments are good and which are wasteful. The CEO-President will couch the debate in terms of responsible investment in our collective future and the long term return on that investment.


-- Successful CEOs foster an entrepreneurial spirit. A CEO-President would reinvigorate an entrepreneurial culture of accountability that embraces risk-taking and reduces an environment of entitlement.

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The CEO of one of America's most powerful financial companies said Sunday that CEOs have some attributes that would serve a president well, but running the country might be better left to a politician.

In an interview being broadcast Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon was asked by host Chuck Todd whether a CEO would make a good president. Two Republican presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Carly Fiorina, have experience as chief executives.

"I think some of the attributes could be good. Running things, knowing how to run things, knowing how to get good people involved," Dimon said.

But Dimon added, "It's not sufficient. I think you have a whole 'nother set of attributes. I think it's really complex — politics. It's three-dimensional chess."

He said he has a lot of respect for how hard politicians' jobs are.

"When I go to Washington, I don't walk away saying, 'It's terrible," he said. "I'm saying, 'my God, they're dealing with some really complex stuff, and it's not that easy to do.'"

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Carly Fiorina has a big problem with the truth. More specifically, she has a problem with embellishing the truth, in a manner very reminiscent of disgraced NBC anchor Brian Williams.

On Friday, conservative radio host Sean Hannity asked Fiorina to explain stories that Hewlett-Packard violated in the Iran embargo, by selling millions of dollars of computers, parts and equipment through a Dubai-based company, while she was CEO.

"The SEC did a thorough investigation and concluded that no one in management, myself included, knew anything about it," Fiorina told Hannity.

She repeated the line, nearly verbatim, to FOX News Sunday host Chris Wallace, this weekend.

"In fact, the SEC investigation proved that neither I nor anyone else in management knew about it," she told Wallace.

Yes, except the SEC investigation didn't. In fact, the SEC didn't perform an investigation at all, especially one that cleared her of any knowledge of the affair.

What is true is that the SEC's Division of Corporate Finance inquired about HP's dealings with Iran. There was back and forth, with the SEC asking questions, and HP answering, which ended with this letter from the SEC. But, there is no record of the Enforcement Division -- the only division that performs investigations -- taking up the matter. Thus, no investigation was performed.

That, in and of itself, may have been a satisfactory answer. In fact, it would have been a very satisfactory answer.

It used to be. On Fiorina's own 2010 Senate campaign fact-check site, the campaign makes no claim about the SEC clearing Fiorina of having any personal knowledge. It, unlike Fiorina herself, sticks to the facts in saying that the SEC "inquired about" -- not "investigated" -- the matter, but chose not to prosecute.

Further, an Associated Press story, posted at FOXNews.com, reported that HP "acknowledged that it knew" sales were occurring in Iran, despite the embargo, but maintained it did not violate the law.

So, there never was a real investigation into the matter, let alone one that declared her, or anyone at HP, innocent of any knowledge of the matter.

In short, Fiorina took the truth, and then added some tinsel, in lying to Sean Hannity and Chris Wallace.

This is part of an emerging and disturbing pattern with Fiorina, who has already been proven to embellish the facts.

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