Customer Reviews

Tough Choices: A Memoir

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(15)

 

 

Having lived through the Carly era at AT&T/Lucent, she definitely has a revisionist, rather than unbiased, view of the impact of her actions. She is truly charismatic, bright and riveting to watch and interact with. Through her career; however, she has consistently made poor decisions in terms of contracts, partnerships, acquisitions, organizational structure -you name it. The key criteria was that it make a splash and look good at the time, although many of her key decisions had long-term negative consequences. (Note the vendor financing scandals at Lucent, which she excaped before that exploded.) The impact of those decisions never marred her reputation, as she was always on to the next rung of the ladder. Her ending at HP was inevitable and, even now, she can't see that she has always been about perception versus reality. It is a shame that such a talent couldn't have focused on real business growth and achievement rather than focusing on their self-promotion. In that regard, I find her to be very representative of US business (and other) culture where perception is everything. In the end,she does not represent a particularly uplifting model for female leadership, as she fully bought into the prevailing system, which desperately needs to be changed.

I thought this book was an opportunity to gain more insight into the tumultuous changes in hp during her reign. Unfortunately, it seemed a self serving story with little evidence of honest insight. It seemed more of a reflection of critisicm. Far too few examples of honest responsibility for some demonstrably poor decisions.

I was an HP employee after the Compaq merger and had worked prior to that at both Digital and Tandem. Those of us with this "pre-merger Compaq" background found that being a part of HP was very much a mixed blessing. Carly Fiorina was both CEO and Chairperson by then, and this book provides a view of what she thought she was doing, which is quite different from what those of us in the trenches were seeing. Still, it is well written and provides insights into how hard it is to "re-invent" (or whatever phrase you prefer) a large bureaucratic organization with many competing interests and hidden agendas.

What struck me as the biggest disconnect between the book and what we saw was Carly's emphasis in the book that "strategy and execution are two sides of the same coin." Nice phrase. Too bad she didn't actually do it, though it seems she thought she did. Her strategic visions were always compelling, though of course they changed from one marketing campaign to the next (from "leading technology company" to "all the world is digital, virtual, etc, etc"). So maybe you can't really call them strategies. But far worse was the execution. There was no accountability. There were matrix orgainizations everywhere. We saw the sales force sandbagging every quarter, mentioned this up the line, and were told to shut up. We saw the "42 longs" in the senior management ranks and marveled at how long they got away with non-performance. We saw that 65% of our operating expenses came from assessments over which we had no control. When we complained, we were called "whiners" and told to live with it. It's this kind of stuff that Hurd has fixed.

Then there were the small irritations. In the book, she complains about people being overly polite and not airing their true feelings. But it was clear in meetings with senior executives that certain questions were unaskable. When some poor soul would dare to ask something "embarrasing", they were castigated on-the-spot in public. This happened many times, by Carly herself in several instances. People aren't so stupid as to make that mistake very often. And the airplanes. Carly complains in the book that people didn't like the fact that she had a corporate jet on call. That wasn't it. What people didn't like as that HP had 5 corporate jets and that, at the time when there were layoffs and budget cuts, internal announcements came out about what a good idea it was that HP would sell the two Compaq jets and buy two new jets that matched the three existing HP jets in order to save on maintenance costs. No mention of living with only three jets when everyone else was flying coach, even on 14 hour trips to Japan.

In the end, Carly didn't meet her commitments. That's why she was fired. She blames sexism. Nonsense. She promised to fix HP in three years. She claimed publically that she had done that. Everyone internally knew it was BS, and the Board eventually figured it out too. Since Mark Hurd has taken over, he has done the basic execution that Carly never did. Was she right to buy Compaq? I say yes. The computer system leadership in HP is now coming mostly out of the Compaq heritage (of course, printers, which is pure HP, does fine as well). But it took a real nuts-and-bolts execution person - Mark Hurd - to complete the fixing of HP. The Board did the right thing.

Sweet, smart, decent Carly Fiorina--how well she does faux innocence. She has no idea why she was fired! How could they fire her? All she did was to almost destroy a big company while making oodles of money for herself and spending her time getting her perfectly coiffed photos published. She writes that she likes to work with people--she must have really enjoyed making thousands of hard-working HP employees miserable.

What's behind that tight smile? You won't know by reading her memoir, which is a book-length public relations release. It describes her career choices and corporate battles without useful insight. The cumbersome business jargon is annoying, but not quite as annoying as the bland, fake front she puts up. To get the real story of her ambitious drive up the executive ladder and ill-considered battle to acquire Compaq, read Backfire by Peter Burrows. That fight left HP reeling and its board a war zone, with leak investigations leading to the questionable tactics now under investigation by California prosecutors.

Sure, HP had troubles and needed change, but her dreadful management left it a complete, chaotic shambles. It would be good to understand how things went so very wrong, but Fiorina is no better at explaining than she was at running the firm. Predictably, she goes for the "gender" card to defend herself. So let's be fair: she was certainly no worse than the male board members who agreed to her outrageous pay package. She and they could be icons for all that's wrong with corporate America.

Carly is a talented executive who made some big mistakes at HP. She could learn from them and move on to be a great executive, but she doesn't appear willing to acknowledge her mistakes, much less learn from them. She throws a lot of blame around in this book seems blinded by her own arrogance. I personally hate when people talk about making "tough choices" as if it shows gutsiness, or proves character. I'd rather hear some discussion about making correct choices, or informed choices. Since Carly is reported to be considering a run for office, this arrogance and disinclination to accept responsibility or blame for bad choices, should be kept in mind.

Her statements of false bravado and phoney humbleness about caring about HP when in reality her concern is 'it's all about her'. Every description was an objective to bathe herself in her own glory.

She points elsewhere to her causes of her troubles at HP and bemoans the difficulties that she had. She accepts no knowledge for the reasoning for why she was fired. CEO's like Fiorina are given too much liberty, money and recognition with limited recourse or responsibility to produce effective results to the company, employees and stockholders.

I think she now feels she has an opportunity to come out from cover after being fired for having so many conflicts with the HP directors and original HP founders because of the recent problems within the Board at HP.

As a 21-year HP veteran who survived the Carly "cult of personality" years, I would describe this book as self-serving hogwash. In my opinion, her abrupt dispatch was the much deserved result of arrogance and incompetence, not sexism. In thousands of conversations with other HP employees during those five years, not once did I hear disparaging comments regarding her gender. The merger with Compaq was of dubious business value but allowed her to place her mark on this venerated company while diluting a culture based on egalitarianism and merit. HP missed quarter after quarter under Carly's leadership, the stock price dropped by 75%, and she blames everyone but herself. New CEO Mark Hurd demonstrated a more thorough understanding of the HP businesses during his first employee meeting than Carly ever had, and won back much of the employee drive and dedication that Carly squandered. HP hasn't missed a quarter since and the stock price has more than doubled. Carly bolstered HP's sagging brand, to be sure; spin is her specialty. But it seemed to employees that Carly then usurped the brand for her own personal glory. Carly eliminated thousands of competent and loyal HP employees who didn't get $42M golden parachutes, so please spare us the crocodile tears. Avoiding this book shouldn't be a Tough Choice for anyone.

I am a big fan of biographies, but after reading this book, I came to a conclusion that biography is more interesting when it's written by a third party. When a person writes about his/her life, the author tends to write all the "cool" stories, and there is nothing I can learn about the real person who has failed, became angry and upset, and surviveed from it. I am sure Ms. Fiorina is an extremely interesting and strong person, but I could not feel it from this book, which is a collection of stories to show how great she is, and that's just about it.

In addition, I was a little ticked about her opinion on law school being a place to learn all the old stuff and not creating anything new. As a law school graduate, I remember the excitement of reading cases like Brown vs. Board of Education and Wade vs. Roe. Law does create new things too, and it seems that Ms. Fiorina could not see that after studying the law only one semester. It make me question though... Ms. Fiorina majored history as her undergraduate study. Isn't it the ultimate study of learning the "old stuff"? Her opinion of law school seems to me is just another self-serving "execuse" and not the real reason.

Anyhow, it was like reading a biography of a robott. Very shallow and not interesting at all.

After reading this I feel any positive book reviews on this are subject to the delusion that the HP/Compaq merger was all good for HP. Little entertainment value here...Carly fails to address that years after this merger HP is still struggles with integrating people, facilities and products. Her layoffs continue. Facilities are closing or locating abroad. Product lines have to shrink as support staff decline.

She writes that HP is financially healther from her decisions, it's only now three years later after a all time low in stock prices. I was dissappointed to see her "spin" on record layoffs, WFR's and a debacle WWW managed on her watch migrating HP's manufacturing operations over to SAP. Carley leaves out the accounts of Customers who were furious, the late and lost shipments and delays with JIT manufacturing SNAFU's?

She discusses the executive choices but fails to decend into the cost it took, in people, customers and then to 'weight' any such benefits with her huge sign-on bonus and monster exit & parachute clauses paid by HP stockholders...

Oh, and she mentions but has little comment on HP employees, stockholders and many of the Hewlett & Packard families that fought "against" this giant merger...why? Share Carly...

Where would HP be now? Depends how much cheaper Compaq be to aquire today... IBM divested it's PC busness to Lenovo. Carly must follow-up her book with another one a few years from now on her next choices...perhaps retirement or BASE jumping?

I don't remember much media hype about Carly duing her reign as CEO. To hear her tell it, she was featured on every news show 24/7 (an exaggeration but you get my point.) Carly is lauded for being a terrific communicator and what she communicates most often in this book is how all the great ideas were hers first and how failures occured because she was sabotaged. Her praise for all the hard work put in by the "little people" is disingenuous. I have no doubt Carly made significant contributions during her time as the HP CEO but I was disappointed that this book was often about poor Carly rather than a thoughtful look back on what worked and what didn't during her reign.