By Elizabeth Williamson
A newcomer to national politics, Carly Fiorina is running for
president by trumpeting her business experience--rising from the
secretarial pool to the pinnacle of Hewlett-Packard Co. Her first
formal day as a candidate showed that tenure will come under tough
scrutiny.
In an online chat tied to the formal launch of her Republican
campaign, Mrs. Fiorina was asked why the computer company laid off
30,000 workers during her tenure. Another questioner asked why
H-P's stock price fell by so much.
Mrs. Fiorina was chief executive at H-P from 1999 until her
firing in 2005 amid a board-management slugfest that led to years
of upheaval at the Silicon Valley company. She is arguing that
experience makes her qualified to lead the charge against what she
calls crony capitalism, encourage entrepreneurship and make "tough
choices."
"Yep, I got fired," she said in a recent interview before her
official announcement. "I'll stand on my record and run on my
record all day long."
Whether she can succeed will go a long way toward determining
whether Mrs. Fiorina will be a viable candidate in a crowded and
well-funded Republican primary field.
"I managed H-P through a very difficult time," she said Monday
to questioners on Periscope, a social-media application. "During
that period, every single tech company had to make some tough
choices. There's nothing worse than telling someone they don't have
a job."
Mrs. Fiorina, 60 years old, started her campaign on the same day
that another candidate with no experience as a national candidate,
retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson also formally entered the GOP
primary race. Speaking to a crowd in his home town of Detroit, Mr.
Carson talked about his upbringing by an economically struggling
single mother and highlighted a work ethic that propelled him to
chief of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University in
Baltimore.
On Tuesday, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee is set to
formally start his GOP campaign.
Mrs. Fiorina launched her campaign website with a video of
herself sitting on a couch, a setting strikingly similar to Hillary
Clinton's 2008 announcement video--except that in her video, Mrs.
Fiorina watches Mrs. Clinton's video, then turns off the TV.
"Our founders never intended us to have a professional political
class....If you're tired of the sound bites, the vitriol, the
pettiness, the egos, the corruption...then join us," she says.
Mrs. Fiorina's website says that during her H-P tenure, the
company "doubled revenues; more than quadrupled its growth rate;
tripled the rate of innovation, with 11 patents a day."
As CEO, Mrs. Fiorina spearheaded the 2002 takeover of Compaq
Computer, which divided shareholders and directors: While it turned
H-P into a market leader, it was seen as a risky bet on low-margin
personal computers. The battle over whether or not to acquire
Compaq pitted Mrs. Fiorina and her allies against a son of an H-P
founder.
In the aftermath of the merger, H-P insiders leaked a detailed
list of the board's concerns with Mrs. Fiorina's leadership to The
Wall Street Journal. She confronted the board over the leaks, and
in the ensuing battle, she lost her job. The search for corporate
leakers then grew into a corporate spying scandal involving law
enforcement.
During Mrs. Fiorina's tenure, H-P stock lost half its value.
"Many tech companies while I was CEO also lost half their
value," she said in response to a question in the Periscope
chat.
Some critics say Mrs. Fiorina record points to a failure of
leadership. "It's an offensive joke that someone with such a poor
record running a company wants to be president," said Jean-Louis
Gassée, an early H-P executive who went on to become Apple Inc.'s
head of Macintosh development and to found Be Inc.
Mr. Gassée, who has followed H-P as an investor and analyst for
five decades, attributes Mrs. Fiorina's decision to run for the
White House to "chutzpah...no self-awareness, no humility."
Others take a more nuanced view. With the Compaq merger, "Carly
was ultimately right, in that, in time, H-P vaulted past Dell and
was the undisputed leader in the global market for computers," said
Arik Hesseldahl, a senior editor at technology website Re/code, who
has covered H-P for 15 years.
H-P today is undergoing a deep restructuring and has shed
thousands of additional jobs. Mrs. Fiorina left with tens of
millions of dollars in severance.
Mrs. Fiorina hadn't held any full-time private-sector job since
leaving H-P a decade ago. Her government experience includes unpaid
service on the Defense Business Board, which looked at staffing
issues, among others, at the Pentagon; and two years leading the
Central Intelligence Agency's External Advisory Board, from 2007 to
2009.
Natalie Andrews contributed to this article.
Write to Elizabeth Williamson at
elizabeth.williamson@wsj.com
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