Customer Reviews

Perfect Enough: Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

One of my concerns about this book is its frequent depiction of Carly Fiorina as not only an excellent communicator, but a charismatic one as well. This is nonsense. She may be charming at times, but this is a charm without substance, and her public communications are often both trite and insulting to important customers, potential customers or potential employees. If author Anders' had analyzed some of her speeches in depth, I think he would have come to the same conclusion. This is not just some historical problem, she just delivered (6-19-04) yet another of these seriously unhinged addresses at UCLA for the Commencement of the Engineering College there. The text of this speech is available (for now at least) on HP's web site alongside her executive biography.

UCLA has one of the best engineering schools in the country and they have a large number of serious students of engineering. Yet Carly decides to start out her address with a joke about Donald Trump's hair and soon starts rambling at length and incoherently about her impressions of reality television. She continues on with references to disco, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, William Hung and yet another reference to Donald Trump's hair.

This Carly performance is an extreme embarrassment to HP and its investors. After hearing this speech, which implied they were a bunch of airheads, why would any UCLA student or faculty member want to come to HP? Why would they want to buy an HP computer when they could buy a Dell or an IBM? Why would Donald Trump want to buy HP equipment for his firms or give HP valuable free advertising by making a complimentary reference to HP equipment?

This would have been a much better book if George Anders had read and analyzed her speeches. While most are doubtless written by others, she approves all of them, and can certainly reject inappropriate material rather than broadcast it to the world. If there is anyone left that still thinks Carly Fiorina is effective as a Celebrity Spokesperson sort of CEO, they should read her UCLA address.

American tech industries were in the middle of tough times and facing a very uncertain future, as they still are, and the HP board did not understand what kind of "new HP" would deal best with that new world. None of this is in the book, but this should've been reasonably clear by 2003 when the book was published. And Carly, with a little insight, should be seen as just another bubble economy internet dream seller. She quickly developed "an internet story" to sell herself to HP, and ostensibly for HP to sell to the world, and the board was _so_ delighted. Between the lines (we can find out a lot there, as this book is fully documented, and so it earns three stars) the board comes off as quite naive, and Carly as what she is: a saleswoman who pumps herself up to "believe" what she's selling, but others should be a whole lot more skeptical.

Anders writes without insight. For example, all of this Carly story selling is coming chronologically on the downside of the tech bubble. At that point, but at least for Anders by 2003, the b.s./fakery should've been ripe for exposure. Also arising from the facts but absent is some big picture thinking on the whole matter of naive boards & naive directors (including Hewlett) attempting to decide the future of a company as technically complex and in as many businesses as HP. Finally, no exposure of the following: it seemed clear (between the lines) that part of every side's plan for HP -- whether it stayed in one piece, merged with Compaq, or not -- was to slash employees and ship lots of jobs to cheap labor sites overseas. Both sides knew this would be an obvious part of "the solution" but nobody would say it publicly (though they tried euphemistically to give the right signals to Wall Street). Understandable in a proxy fight with many employees holding stock, but you expect Anders to notice and discuss such important unspoken matters (and why they are unspoken), at least in a book aspiring to be more than simple, competent, day-to-day reporting.

Carly Fiorina took over HP in July 1999. Some interesting numbers since that time:
Lexmark shares up 40%
Canon shares up 16%
Dell shares up 3%
IBM shares down 23%
HP shares down 60%
(Look it up on money.msn.com)
Ms. Fiorina also entered saying that HP should dump the printing business in order to concentrate on e-commerce. 3 years later, that business was being described as HP's crown jewels. She also claimed that what HP needed was more accountibility (see numbers above). And we're supposed to be interested by her views on business?

The most interesting aspect of George Anders' "Perfect Enough" is the book's very existence: it is tangible evidence of the power of the HP PR machine under Carly Fiorina, and the transformation of HP from heads-down engineering excellence to a Carly-centric media machine. In other words, this is the book that HP and the HP board want the public to read, facing the release of a competing and more critical book ("Backfire" by Peter Burrows). In "Perfect Enough", Fiorina is positioned favorably - a lone crusader in a sexist culture of engineers who have lost the "shining soul" that made the company and its founders legend. She is depicted as the grim and embattled hero, fighting and winning the good fight against impossible obstacles both internal and external. It would be wrong to accuse Fiorina of wrecking the celebrated "HP Way", already in steep decline long before her tenure. But to portray her as the staunch defender of a cause she seems not to understand, and trivializes through slogans and catch-phases, is a far more serious offense which Anders chooses to overlook.

Much has been made of the unfettered access the author was granted to Carly and the board, resulting in a detailed account of the HP recollection of events behind closed doors. But unless you are really interested in the menus of the lunches served to the board in critical meetings, I'd recommend Burrows' book for an "unsanctioned", but far more balanced, portrait of the events leading to HP's acquisition of Compaq.

There are two sides to every merger and in the case of Hewlett Packard and Compaq Computer, the competing sides weren't just the companies. They include the historians documenting it.

For Perfect Enough, George Anders gained access to HP CEO Carly Fiorina and her fellow board members and executives. It provides a full picture of the genesis of the computing deal. Explaining the frustration board members felt at the company's inability to keep up with competitors benefiting from the Internet boom such as Dell Computer Corp. or release a killer new product since the laser printer in the early 1980s, Anders stresses that the board members - and not just Fiorina- were seeking a radical makeover for HP.

Peter Burrows' competing book about the merger, Backfire, paints Carly Fiorina as a brilliant marketer and communicator who stumbled into HP after one of the worst executive search jobs of all time by Christian Timbers. Her first two years was good idea after good idea followed by poor execution after poorer execution. The Business Week journalist implies the Compaq merger was primarily a way to deflect attention away from her inability to turn the company around after her first two years there.

Anders' more sympathetic account is fascinating at times such as its description of the complex relationship between Fiorina and David Packard's daughter Susan Packard-Orr. But, Burrows' book - unencumbered by any sense of loyalty to Fiorina, who snubbed the author - digs deeper into Fiorina's past by interviewing her ex-husband and childhood friends, thereby providing a much fuller picture of the executive, if not the entire organization.

Taken together, the two books complement each other nicely. It remains to be seen if the same can be said for the merger.

It is hard not be seduced (given today's brutal business environment) into a romantic and nostalgic version of company loyalty and employee loyalty. I grew up dreaming of the HP Way - it seemed such a cool place to be part of. Perfection, innovation, doing it right by the people and the community at large while making profits thrived for 60 years. While there are many that think Carly is the "witch" - the old principles had to be redefined for HP's survival given the changes in the marketplace. HP didn't have much choice: acquire another company to fill the holes in the portfolio, or become a part of someone else's portfolio. Either way, the loss of innocence was inevitable. An interesting study would be to go back and see where in the 60 years of its history, HP lost its way. To blame Carly is akin to blame the fireman who is gutting a portion of your burning house to contain the damage. It is not a question of heart - it is making hard and non-sentimental decisions.

The story of the old HP days leading to the boardroom struggles as part of the Compaq merger is beautifully told. It transports you to a bygone era and then brings you right into the harsh light of brutal facts of market reality peppered with the human element of power, fame, emotions, convictions, etc. It nicely balances the varied prespectives of several characters, their personal beliefs and struggles - it reads both like a suspense novel and a business book.

Time will tell if the merger works or not - but sadly the "shining soul" that Carly refered to in her conversations will be missing from the new HP. While Walter Hewlett could not define the plan of action if the Compaq acquisition did not go through, Carly could not define what the "soul" of the new HP will be comprised of. A key aspect that will determine the long term success of HPQ: What values and work ethics were lost and what remained - can the employees believe in and rally behind the "new values" (as and when they are defined)

In this narration, the sentimental / nostalgic view point loses in the end (no hollywood ending here!), workers of yesterday, today and tomorrow will wonder: Can companies beyond a certain size, in certain markets still have a heart / soul and be wildly successful - living good while doing good?

This unevenly written book reads like yet another vehicle for Fiorina's ongoing self-promotion efforts. After a skewed retelling of the 60 year history of leadership at HP, fully 25% of the book is consumed by a blow-by-blow account of the cat-fight leading up to shareholder approval of the aquisition of Compaq. She repeatedly blames HP's recent leadership ills on Lew Platt yet there is so much more that could have been written of Fiorina's view of the leadership at HP such as why the executives of struggling businesses (computers, services) were retained when their peers in the vastly successful printing businesses chose to "seek opportunities elsewhere". Don't waste your money on this one. Anders panders way too much to Fiorina's rhetoric.

This book, unfortunately, did not have real coverage in the two areas that I regard as most important: quality of sales and marketing execution and wisdom of business investment decisions. When any CEO steps into a position like the one Fiorina did, what investors most want is the highest quality marketing and sales of existing products and the best business judgement available concerning future investments. Anders' famously tells us what the HP Board had for lunch one day but failed to provide insight into these two key areas.

There were major failures in both areas that Anders could have warned us about. For example, HP has fallen from number 3 when Carly took over to number 6 in the digital camera market. It was critical to move from number 3 to at least number 2 in this market in order to have a good business here and instead we find she fell to a pathetic and unsustainable number 6. Her VP responsible for this disaster still has his job, apparently with an office near a beach in San Diego. Before Carly, when this general area was a wildly successful one for HP, a previous HP VP lived close to the key HP imaging site in Boise, Idaho. Anders could have warned us this was failing and why.

I was also very disappointed that Anders did not warn us about the poor new business investment decisions being made Fiorina aside from Compaq. Heavy investments in "digital entertainment" may provide Carly with an excuse for her hobnobing with Hollywood and music industry people but is unlikely to yield much in the way of profit. About the time he retired Jack Welch (former CEO of GE) mentioned that he had never met Carly. I doubt she has much time for people like Welch that were in the position to buy billions of dollars of HP products because she spends so much time with people that are unlikely to buy anything including Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson, Sheryl Crow, Oprah Winfrey, Ben Affleck, the Sopranos etc. There does not appear to be a real business agenda here -- it seems social in nature. This obvious perspective should have been noted in Anders' book. Surely the fact that Carly Fiorina has taken her eye off the ball at HP, and this has been going on for many years, deserves to be at least duly noted.

George Anders' book, which is primarily a history of the Hewlett-Packard/Compaq merger, is quite simply the most appallingly bad business book I have read in many years. It deserves to be read only as a prime example of the unconscionable behavior by writer Anders and CEO Fiorina that others should not emulate.

The problem here is that HP and the publisher positioned this book as the de facto authorized history of this merger by virtue of the special access and cooperation Anders received from Fiorina and her employees, access that was denied to others. And it is very clear from Anders account that Fiorina's objective of this cooperation was a wholly gratuitous attack on the Hewlett and Packard families, HP traditions and HP employees. The reason this attack is wholly gratuitous is that the book was published many months after she had won the merger fight. At this point there was zero business purpose in making such an attack. Her cooperation with Anders is a huge, huge error in business judgment. The Board needs to demand the resignations of those it deems responsible which should certainly include the advisors that encouraged the course of action taken here.

This book gives comprehensive, balanced treatment to the storied founding and meteoric growth of Hewlett-Packard and its leaders. For those of us who have never worked at HP, we get a clear sense for what it was like when Bill and Dave ran the place. We also come to understand the challenges HP faced as it grew, utlimately becoming, to some degree, a victim of its own success.

There is drama all along the way. It is fascinating to watch the process of the board selecting Carly Fiorina as CEO. There is more drama as one watches her predecessor, Lewis Platt, struggle while watching HP change from "old" to "new."

Some of the book's most interesting perspective relates to the personalities involved in managing and governing HP, from family members running foundations controlling large blocks of HP stock, to board members running large businesses in their own right, to reluctant heroes such as Dick Hackborn, who served as a mentor to Carly Fiorina and became HP's chairman for a time. While the background on the family foundations is excessive, we come to know intimately the cast of characters in the HP-Compaq drama. Whether you supported the HP-Compaq merger or not, it is clear that everyone involved was passionate about his or her cause.

The greatest insights the book offers relate to leadership -- Carly Fiorina's relentless persistence in the face of brutal adversity; the power of passionate belief in one's mission; the unswerving support of all but one HP board member of the HP-Compaq deal; and the realization that organizational change can indeed be wrenching.

Overall, a well-documented, highly entertaining read.