Title: President and CEO, Hewlett-Packard Company
Fiorina's Seven Rules for Personal Growth and Business Success:
1. Find the high challenge, it's the joy of the job.
2. Set clear goals and articulate ways to grow, lead and win.
3. The potential of the individual and the company is absolutely based on self-assessment.
4. Understand the power of teamwork and that no one can do it all by themselves.
5. To paraphrase Churchill, "Never, never, never give up. Most great victories happen in the last game.
6. There must be a balance between confidence and humility. Be confident enough to excel, but be humble enough to ask for help when you need it.
7. Love what you do, success requires a little passion.
Major events in retrospect:
In February 2005, the board of directors of Hewlett-Packard, the world's leading IT company, announced that Carly Fiorina would no longer serve as CEO. The reason was that the merged HP was not delivering the results promised to the capital markets and shareholders. It is said that on the day her termination was announced, the share price of HPQ (Hewlett-Packard) on the New York stock market rose by almost 7 percentage points, proving the market's disappointment with Carly Fiorina.
In fact, if you go back to the international computer manufacturing market in 2000, HP and Compaq fought a hard battle between the two sides of the overall level of corporate development and technology, the sword, and slow growth. Hewlett-Packard and Compaq are two companies with a strong history and culture of the international top 100 companies, but also have been in the IT field of the market front, it is difficult for each other to make greater progress to get rid of each other's competition. In such a situation, Carly Fiorina took office after the HP, to change the fate of the two companies in a big way.
In early September 2001, a shocking news to the world appeared in the major media in a prominent position, "the U.S. computer giant Hewlett-Packard announced a price of $ 25 billion, according to the way the stock swap to acquire another famous U.S. computer maker Compaq," in the Hewlett-Packard then CEO Carly Fiorina. Na completed the merger of two of the world's most famous corporations with a stunning stroke, creating a new IT giant. Analysts at the time believed that the merger of Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer would make the new HP the industry's most complete provider of IT products and services, both in the market for business customers and consumers, and would also pose a significant threat to several major manufacturers, such as Dell, who were leaders in the IT world at the time.
Industry insiders believe that Fiorina, then head of HP, was the protagonist in maneuvering that merger. But how she accomplished such a big move is most incomprehensible to analysts. In their view, Fiorina is a layman who does not know anything about computers, but in fact, she is an entrepreneur with a profound vision.
Like to face the challenge of the woman
No one would have thought that when the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT& T) salesman, after climbing all the way up to become the first female president of the nation's top 50 companies. People often think that in the grandfatherly Hewlett-Packard Technology Company, the rapid push for change, must be a plagiarism, tough women. But many of those who came into contact with her eventually realized that Fiorina possessed more than just a brilliant mind; her friendly smile, greetings, and comforting communication style were compelling.
Fiorina's father was a lawyer and her mother an artist. Her college majors were medieval history and philosophy. At first, she worked as a secretary and as a teacher before plunging into AT&T's sales phone service. Fiorina was directly involved in the overall design of AT&T's spinoff of Lucent Technologies until 1995, when she took on a key role and rose through the ranks, being promoted in 1998 to Executive Director of Lucent Technologies' Global Service Provision business unit, managing a division that accounted for 60% of the company's total revenue.
What motivates a gentle woman to run such a large organization? The key thing, says Fiorina, is having the confidence and courage to face challenges.
She has said: In 1984, I was 30 years old, working at AT&T, when the company had just gone through a reorganization, everything was disorganized. So I decided to work in the cross management department, which was the most chaotic, and my coworkers thought I was crazy. My coworkers thought I was crazy. No one understood what was being done there, what was being done there, and everything seemed to be in disarray. In fact, that's what attracted me the most. I loved the challenges, and for better or worse, I knew I would have some impact and make a difference.
At the time, local U.S. phone company bills were the biggest overhead in AT&T's business. Fiorina and her team went through and filtered each bill one by one. She recalls that the room was jammed with cardboard boxes, floor to ceiling, filled with bills. Eventually it really did turn out to be overcharged. The average person might not find this interesting. But we set ourselves the goal of checking every bill, identifying every overcharge, and setting up a bill checking system. By the end of the day, employees across the country had installed the system and it saved the company millions of dollars.
Fiorina also said it was fun to accomplish what others thought was impossible, and that she learned this education from her parents at a young age. My father had health problems and the doctors told him he would never be able to play soccer, but he went on to play soccer very well, she said. He grew up in small town Texas and could be a professor & federal judge. My mother's family, on the other hand, didn't think girls needed to read much and wouldn't help pay for college. So she left home to join the Air Force and went on to become an accomplished artist as well.
To grow into a strong, confident, life-affirming, career-focused executive, Fiorina summarized her seven rules for personal growth and career success:
1. Find the high challenge, that's the fun of the job.
2. Set clear goals and articulate ways to grow, lead and win.
3. The potential of the individual and the company is absolutely based on self-assessment.
4. Understand the power of teamwork and that no one can do it all by themselves.
5. To paraphrase Churchill, "Never, never, never give up. Most great victories happen in the last game.
6. There must be a balance between confidence and humility. Be confident enough to excel, but be humble enough to ask for help when you need it.
7. Love what you do, success requires a little passion.
The CEO who doesn't know anything about computers
Hewlett-Packard, based in Palo Alto, California, is the world's second-largest computer manufacturer, founded in 1939. The founders were two engineers who graduated from Stanford University, William Wheeler and David Pook, and the name of HP came from the combination of their surnames. The two engineers, Wheeler and Pook, opened the company in their own garage in Palo Alto, but no one expected that 60 years later HP would become an international company spanning 120 countries, with 104 subsidiaries and 12,350 employees.
In March 1999, the historic Hewlett-Packard, a global computer manufacturing giant, announced that it was splitting the company in two, creating Computing and Imaging Products and Measurement Instruments and Medical Devices. And Levi Pratt, who had been president since 1992, announced his retirement. So, who will replace the veteran as president, so that HP remains in a position of constant victory?
HP's board of directors specifically put forward the new CEO's four major capabilities: first, to have excellent leadership, forward-looking vision and the ability to develop overall strategy. Second, to have excellent business management skills and financial management skills. Third, a strong sense of enterprise, competitiveness and vitality. Fourth, to have the network market development experience and the ability to manage the expansion of new markets.
It is understood that there were four people competing for the position***, and Fiorina was the only one of them who did not know anything about computers. Fiorina spoke to HP's selection committee and said that it was because she was not computer literate that HP should use her.
Fiorina believes that what she can bring to HP is not computer expertise, but new ideas and a new direction. Her twenty years of experience at Lucent can help HP step into the field of communications and networking. Dick Heckborn, a senior director at HP and one of the selection committee members, mentioned that the selection committee and the board of directors unanimously chose Fiorina because she not only has the appropriate knowledge of the information industry, but also has the skills required of a CEO of a high-tech company.
Fiorina is a humanistic CEO, having studied philosophy at university, and has a particular interest in history and philosophy, which many people with high-tech backgrounds lack. The company selection committee felt that Fiorina was a more macro, objective role that would help the company continue to grow.
HP also paid a considerable price for hiring Fiorina. According to information provided by Fortune magazine, Fiorina was worth $10 million at the time. The world's most influential people, the first three are the founder or owner of the enterprise, and Fiorina as a professional manager, is due to her own unique expertise and energetic and passionate leadership style and ability, HP is willing to pay a high price to make up for her in the predecessor company's benefits and pensions, so that she can be free of worry about contributing to the Hewlett-Packard. Because of this, Fiorina became one of the top 50 most influential business leaders in the world at the time. It is reported that when Hewlett-Packard formally announced Fiorina as the company's president and chief executive officer (CEO), immediately in the global IT community and the stock market created a sensation. Hewlett-Packard's stock price that day jumped up 2.75 dollars, hitting an all-time high of 116.75 dollars per share.
Good communication manager
Fiorina has taught English, read history, but also has a double master's degree in business management and science, these backgrounds in her body synthesized into a special temperament. In terms of communicating with employees, she has a very different style from past HP leaders. In the past, HP's high-ranking executives, mostly poised leaders, but at the same time do not have a strong incendiary. Fiorina speech never read the script, also do not use the slide, but with vivid language so that the audience can quickly accept. She has a background as an English teacher, so her language is very friendly and innovative, and the experience she gained at Lucent as a business engineer at the grassroots level makes her very aware of the needs of her customers and very receptive to them, whether or not they have a tech background.
Just took office as CEO of HP, Fiorina had put forward a not only let the old colleagues can accept, and let the people looking forward to the reform of the refreshing slogan: Preserve the best, reinvent the rest (translated as to remove the wheat from the chaff, and then create new machines). In her view, to accept more people with a tolerant attitude, rather than a revolutionary stance to deny HP's past, fully recognizing HP's existing many quality culture, can better encourage employees to come up with the courage to innovate and performance.
After she took office, the original senior director, Heckborn, who is credited with single-handedly bringing up HP's printer-imaging and other endeavors, had already decided to retire. But Fiorina convinced Heckborn to stay. Fiorina said she needed someone to guide her, and she was willing to take over the HP job only if Heckborn was willing to be chairman. This was actually quite a smart move, and later developments proved that Heckborn did play a role in shortening Fiorina's learning curve and making HP employees feel that the HP ethos was maintained.
Fiorina came to HP at a time when the company was in transition, a time-honored IT company with a great track record. However, with the development of the Internet, the traditional big companies have been too slow to change and have been hit, like HP such a long-established is no exception. Hewlett-Packard's leadership also recognized that HP did not play a leadership role in the first wave of the development of the network economy, but they do not want to lose the opportunity again in the second wave of network development.
Before the radical transformation, HP began with a major internal reorganization. The company was organized into four major divisions based on the businesses it operated: Enterprise Computers, Laser Imaging Systems, Inkjet Imaging Technologies, and Computer Products, and appointed a president and executive officer for each of these divisions, who had their own responsibilities and reported to the president of the company. In addition, another big move is that HP will be specializing in test and measurement division out of the independent company, namely Agilent Technologies (Agilent Technologies), specializing in communications technology and other businesses.
In the face of HP's transformation, Fiorina said at the beginning of her tenure that the main issue facing HP was to reconnect the people of HP with the spirit of fundamental innovation that characterized the company's beginnings more than 60 years ago. The second thing was to get rid of bad habits. Be fast, not slow; be clear, not vague; be ahead of the curve, not behind it; be bold, she said. This is the meaning of "to get rid of the weeds and keep the best, and then create a new machine".
When it comes to resistance and obstacles to reform, Fiorina believes that communication is the key issue and leadership is even more critical when pushing for reform and demanding change. These simple truths still apply despite such advanced technology and widespread knowledge today. People just need humanized communication, people need to meet their leaders in person and hear from them what is important, what it means to them, etc.
Bold radicals
But Fiorina's "reimagining program," which she has been hoping to keep as an icon of HP since she took over, is not looking good. Since November 2000, Fiorina has been engaged in a massive, deep-seated overhaul. She said she wanted to free HP from several years of sluggish, slow growth before it was on the brink of death like IBM and Xerox were 10 years ago.
Fiorina told her employees at the time that we could look in the mirror and see that our big company was going down the tubes, and that the heart of the change at HP was to make it a "multi-talented" company. Like a constantly mutating body, the new HP requires a balance between accomplishing short-term goals and staying ahead of competitors, while also focusing on the long term and opening up new markets.
In order to achieve this goal, Fiorina broke the HP 64 years of decentralized practices, the company's 83 independent of each other, only one product of the Department of all broken up and merged into four, a department called "end", responsible for the development and production of computers, another One division, called the "end", develops and produces computers, and the other specializes in printers and imaging equipment. These two divisions handed over their products to two "front-end" sales and marketing divisions, which were responsible for selling the products to individuals and companies, respectively. According to Fiorina, the new approach facilitates collaboration within the company by creating a direct line of communication between the top managers in charge of sales and marketing and the engineers, so that product development can fundamentally address users' requirements. According to her, purchasing different products from what used to be a highly decentralized branch office would have created a lot of hassle for users. Now, users only need to talk to the same customer group to solve all their needs.
But industry insiders at the time thought the stakes were too high for Fiorina and the Silicon Valley pioneer she founded in 1938. The founders of HP broke with the old paradigm, abolished the company's hierarchy, and introduced a series of new measures, such as the implementation of the profit-sharing system and the employee cubicle office, not only laid the foundation of a corporate culture that HP is proud of, but also made it a pioneering company. Similarly, Fiorina is taking risks, but what she is trying to do is even more radical. Instead of solving problems one at a time, Fiorina is trying to reform every aspect of Hewlett-Packard at once, which means the company's strategy, organizational structure, corporate culture, compensation system, and every aspect of the company from how to incentivize innovation to streamlining the company's internal procedures. Even the professors at the Lausanne School of Management Development in Switzerland agreed that this reform would be difficult to carry out. In January 2001, after Hewlett-Packard announced more than 1,700 layoffs, its stock fell to $40 a share from $67 a share after a stock split in July 2000, a 19 percent drop from when Fiorina first took the helm.
Subsequently, Fiorina's step is even bigger than people think, in the case of the reform of the whole company has not yet seen much success, Fiorina played the merger of Compaq this move. Industry insiders have exclaimed and evaluated, this 87 billion giant HP will bring much danger to the market after all said that this merger situation is not optimistic. Whether it is from the personnel structure or from the market structure to make adjustments, really to be able to have the strength to participate in the competition in the market, at least half a year to 1.5 years or so, and if the whole company's pace is not good to grasp, this time will be delayed, which will affect the new HP's profitability timetable.
But Fiorina prefers to expect the new HP to move forward with reforms at the speed of network expansion. In response to concerns, she explained that people don't travel in a straight line when sailing, but they do adjust their course to the times and the current situation. Those who know HP's situation are of the opinion that the projected revenue growth plans of HP, as presented by Fiorina, will definitely be affected in the light of the economic slowdown.
Fiorina, on the other hand, has always insisted that a downturn in the company's performance would not change her long-term plans. She has always said that the most terrible thing is not to accelerate action, the biggest risk is to stay put. At the same time, Fiorina is not blind, she led her team to use the U.S. mature legal means, through technical comparisons, market analysis, numerical models, and future trends are expected to evaluate the merger of many of the contradictions and conflicts in the specific aspects of the implementation of the whole board and the market agreed to the fact, and ultimately completed the merger shocked the entire global IT market at the time.
It can be said that without Fiorina's determination to go on, such a huge project would have been destroyed.
A reform that is still difficult to conclude
As it turns out, after more than three years and almost four years of integration and development, Fiorina's initiative did not really make HP fundamentally at the expected rate of development, and HP's stock has been in the doldrums until 2005. Analysts pointed out that Hewlett-Packard is a long history of large enterprises, management systems and cultural traditions are y entrenched, like a megaton ship like turning around is very slow. At the same time, in the market after the merger of Hewlett-Packard has been in many aspects of the adjustment period, it is still difficult to normal operation of the enterprise, as comprehensive coordination, targeting different products to develop the market and obtain more profits. Fiorina herself is more than that, said more than three years than she did at the time to the stock market is expected to be longer, but compared to the HP such a large enterprise I am afraid that the development of lagging behind is a kind of inevitable. The two big companies first together to re-layout deployment, to first shrink and then stretch, she firmly believe that her innovation will have a positive impact on the future of HP. In the Hewlett-Packard board of directors announced that she would step down, the U.S. media generally believe that Fiorina, despite her departure, but she has done this brilliant performance has proved her excellent leadership and organizational management skills. She was duly honored.
Whether the future of HP will evolve as a result of this great renewal that took place at the turn of the century remains to be seen, and the test of time is yet to come. But Carly Fiorina used her intelligence and courageous behavior to perform on the HP stage in the best moments of her life, and as an audience, I believe the whole world applauded her "performance"!