LA Times: "What non-Californians don't know about Carly Fiorina -- but should"

[Attorney in Texas]

Here are some key excerpts from the great article:

she had failed to cast a ballot in 75% of the California elections for which she was an eligible voter. She missed presidential primaries in 2000 and 2004, and the primary and general elections in 2006, including a Senate reelection run by Democrat Dianne Feinstein. She skipped the primary and general elections in 2002, a gubernatorial election year, as well as the historic recall vote that brought Arnold Schwarzenegger to the governor's seat.

...

She was CEO of Hewlett-Packard from mid-1999 to early 2005, a period in which the company's stock sank 49% to 60% (depending on how you count), making it one of the worst-performing high-tech firms.

CEO Fiorina talked a lot about "innovation" while pursuing corporate strategies displaying a striking lack of imagination. She cut HP's payroll by 10,000 employees in 2000 while surrounding her glamorous self with clouds of image and strategy consultants.

...

She blames the California drought on "liberal environmentalists," which is about as uninformed as one can get about water in the West but fits seamlessly with GOP orthodoxy.

[dsc]

1. I would give her the Presidential primaries

since California's primary is in June but the rest is just awful.

[avaistheone1]

2. Carly Fiorina will run for president as a successful tech CEO. Silicon Valley says that's a fantasy.

When Carly Fiorina launches her campaign for president this week, her message to the world will be emphatic: what she did for HP, she can do for America.

From spaghetti dinners in New Hampshire to startup conferences in New York, the former head of Hewlett-Packard is expected to keep staking her claim as a pioneering executive prodigy: “It is only in the United States of America that a young woman can start as a secretary and become CEO of the largest technology company in the world,” she recently posted on Facebook, next to a low rating from a pro-choice group that she called “a badge of honor”.

Fiorina, 60, has never held public office. A 2010 run for US senate collapsed amid images of private jets and million-dollar yachts. Now, she hopes the revived record of a dot-com businesswoman will vault her over the otherwise all-male Republican field of mostly professional politicians – or at least lead to a spot as one of their vice-presidential running mates to face Hillary Clinton head-on.

“We went from a market laggard to market leader,” Fiorina has said of her six years running the computer giant. “Unlike Hillary, I have actually accomplished something.”

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/03/carly-fiorina-run-for-president-hewlett-packard

[RoccoR5955]

24. If she does for America what she did for HP

We will be poorer, have less, and stink worse than we already do!

[Brother Buzz]

3. What Californians don't know about Carly Fiorina: She bailed on wimpy California...

after losing her senatorial bid.

She lives in a fucking mansion on the Potomac River in Lorton, Va. Can you say beltway insider?

[avaistheone1]

4. She lives in her f-ing mansion on the Potomac when she is not

on her private jet, or on her personal yacht.

[Scarsdale]

18. Cosmetic surgery

All that money and she can not afford a decent surgeon? She should SUE the surgeon who gave her THAT face.

[7962]

23. Be careful; she had a cancer battle and that can do a number on your appearance.

[Thor_MN]

33. Compare current pictures with ones from a decade ago.

She has had a lot of work done, she looks younger now than then.

[niyad]

36. hmmm, is that middle finger position intentional?

[MsLeopard]

41. Resting bitch face

if I've ever seen it!

[Hekate]

5. Michael Hiltzik is always a good read. Thanks for posting this about Fiorina.

Fiorina: a standout in a bad field, but otherwise just another GOPer.

[MisterP]

6. and her Caltech speech is exactly what you'd expect from someone with a BA in medieval lit

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/execteam/speeches/fiorina/caltech04.html
oh GOD it just went on and on

[Helen Borg]

7. Haha! She definitely does not come across as creative!

More like an empty suit with a mean streak.

[ram2008]

8. Donald Trump is right: she is a loser

Lost the Senate Seat against Boxer, caused massive layoffs and crashed at HP... everything she touches turns to crap. Go away Fiorina.

[asiliveandbreathe]

9. Let's not forget Lucent - so many lives turned upside down

Lost jobs and lost healthcare - not to mention pensions......

It should have been a buy out of Compaq not a merger. This was corporate greed at its finest at the expense of the workers.

Face it, the Repubicans have NO leader.....and NO platform - and NO vision...for the American people...they will continue to bottomfeed for votes..

[magical thyme]

20. one of the 1st things HP did when they took over Compaq was raid DEC's pension fund

They claimed it was "overfunded."

I have an acquaintance who had a small pension courtesy of the grocery store he worked at in college around the same time I had my pension from DEC.

20 years later -- just in the last year or so -- we were each offered buyouts of our pensions. His was 10X its original amount. Mine from DEC was ~5.5X the original amount. Time frame was the same.

[weknowvino2]

10. Article forgot to mention

that Fiorina SPIED on the HP board members.
Despicable Woman.

[tammywammy]

38. The spying was after Fiorina left HP. n/t

[Octafish]

11. Vice Presidential timbre of the repuglian persuasion.

She'll go far, following in Sneering Dick Cheney's skid marks.

[Attorney in Texas]

14. Hmmm ... a sharp-tongued VP candidate with no real political experience. How could that go wrong?

[HassleCat]

27. What can she see from her porch?

The ice flow on which she set adrift HP?

[olddots]

12. She is like William F. Buckley

a poisonous lizard but well tailored .

[HughBeaumont]

13. One person I'm friends with says he trusts Chainsaw Carly because she's a successful executive.

Even after I supplied tons of worker testimonials, facts about her disastrous merger with Compaq, using the company coffers as her personal bank, the multiple thousands of workers fired/positions offshored, her $42 million dollar exit package for doing a below-average job (in a supposed "meritocracy&quot , etc.

Facts mean nothing to people who have someone else doing the thinking FOR them.

[SlipperySlope]

15. I was an HP employee during Carly's term

> She cut HP's payroll by 10,000 employees in 2000 while surrounding her glamorous self with clouds of image and strategy consultants.

It wasn't the fact that she orchestrated the cut. HP had never had layoffs. The history of the company, going back to Bill and Dave in 1938, had been one of a company that bent over backwards to protect the employees. In return, most HP employees had an unwavering faith and loyalty to the company. It was a very special place.

When Carly first came in many of us were excited. Here was an dynamic leader with fresh ideas who was going to reinvigorate the company. There was some grumbling about bringing in an outsider, but I think in general most of us wanted her to succeed. We believed in the company, the company believed in us, she was our new leader, and we were all in this together.

When Carly decided to start layoffs it was a shock to the company. HP didn't even know how to lay people off. We had to bring in outside consultants to explain how to do layoffs. Then Carly started talking about "reinventing the HP Way". For those who don't know, HP had a very strong and very deep corporate culture called the "HP Way". It wasn't simply some corporate bullshit that nobody believed in, it was a set of guiding principles that most of us used to guide our daily interactions in the company. It most assuredly wasn't some crap that had been slapped together by a bunch of consultants around the management style of the day, instead it was an organic culture that had developed over many decades. Carly saying she wanted to "reinvent the HP way" would be like Donald Trump saying he wanted to "rewrite the Constitution" - it did not go over well with the company loyal.

At some point it started to feel like the HP immune system was working to eject Carly. She was a foreign body that was doing harm to the company and it became more and more realized that everything she said was hot air, and that the best employees could do was work against her agenda, do the right thing, and hope to survive the waves of layoffs.

The day her resignation was announced, there were many "ding-dong the witch is dead" emails sent and posters hanging in hallways.

Screw her, everything about her, and everything she stands for. She single-handedly changed one of the greatest American companies that ever existed into yet another soulless corporation.

We have trust and respect for individuals.
We focus on a high level of achievement and contribution.
We conduct our business with uncompromising integrity.
We achieve our common objectives through teamwork.
We encourage flexibility and innovation.

[Kip Humphrey]

16. Best Post in the Thread! Thanks for your insider's view.

[LynneSin]

17. If she wants to do for the United States what she did for HP all I have to say is this...

NO FUCKING THANK YOU!!!!

[IDemo]

19. I was a long-term contractor ("permatemp") during that time

I witnessed an engineer turning beet red with anger while talking about the damage she was doing, and he actually turned and slammed his fist into a steel test chamber. Not a happy man.

The day her exit was announced, a small team near me was heard singing "Ding-dong, the witch is gone".

[magical thyme]

21. Agreed. HP's culture was legendary in high-tech, not unlike Digital's

Both with cultures that took care of their people and avoided layoffs.

And in exchange, I know that people at Digital worked their asses off and tolerated a certain amount of BS they would never have tolerated anywhere else. The software services delivery people would work 90-100 hour weeks to make sure projects came in on time after sales people and lousy managers oversold their capabilities.

The layoffs (and ultimate sale) at Digital was a major betrayal. I expect the layoffs felt the same at HP.

[Angry Dragon]

22. you should make this into an OP

[Turn CO Blue]

25. Agree with above, should be an OP

We have to start our oppo now on this shark; the GOP is going to want her for VP.

[djean111]

28. My fiance (at the time) worked for HP - customer engineer.

What she did to the CE's was to charge them with being salesmen. They hated that.

What she did with the salesmen was give them impossible sales quotas, which put them in the position of telling clients that the hardware they sold them a year ago, on the premise that it would be good for their needs for a couple or a few years, needed to be replaced right now.

I was a system manager responsible for some HP and some Tandem systems, and was affected directly. Imagine trying to tell your manager that the equipment you just bought last year, under the premise that we did not need money in the budget for this year, was supposedly obsolete. And the salesmen would make end runs around the system managers, desperate to make a sale.

And then there was the "just show them a shiny brochure" bullshit. The Tandem-based software group I was working in was going along just fine, working with the Tandem guys to sell a software/hardware packaged telephone billing solution to countries overseas and our own company. The HP salesmen came in and tried to undercut the Tandem guys, begging (actually almost ordering) us to switch to HP equipment. They even contacted our overseas customers, who were confused about this and angry as they had already invested in the Tandems. We said here is basically the metrics of what we are doing, number of transactions per second - show us a stress test on HP equipment. We will help design the test software.

The answer was NO, we were to just trust them and purchase the HP equipment because - shiny brochure.

She is nothing but a sleazy salesperson.

[Attorney in Texas]

32. Thanks for this.

[Diclotican]

34. SlipperySlope

SlipperySlope

HP was a great company - I have never worked for them - but I have had a few computer from them and until the last computer, been rather happy using them...

But I do rembember her - how he screwed up HP and allmoust ruined the company before she left... A lot of money richer... And now she want to do that to the US too... As she did to HP...

Poor Americans if She is getting into the White House as President - currently I would say all of the 17 in the race is a present danger to the US more than any enemy current or past would ever be..

Diclotican

[shanti]

35. Wasn't that the Roseville campus?

I remember the layoffs. She's a disgusting piece of work, she is.

[niyad]

37. one of my best friends also worked there during chainsaw carly's tenure. she had to train

her overseas replacement. to this day, we do not mention hp at get-togethers.

[Dawson Leery]

39. Those foreign bodies are known to become deadly at some point.

Had Carly not been given the boot, she would have done to HP what aids did to Brian White.

[Cleita]

26. Don't forget. She taught herself Greek so she could read the Bible according to

friend, Mary Matalin. Gee, I thought an English translation was available. And how does that help her be a competent President?

[apnu]

29. Carly is awful

My company standardized on HPs while she was running things. The product line when to hell and the software bloat was epic. Everything has "Innovation" on it and it was a open joke around the shop. Every HP that I had to set up, meant at least an hour of stripping out bloated crap just to make it functional.

Oh and the spying thing, doing it badly, getting caught, then fired for it really makes her look like a dunce. I'm astonished she's even bothering to run. She got spanked in her Senatorial run, what makes her think she's viable for President?

Republicans around my office were pretty high on her after watching highlights of the JV 'debate' then I reminded them about the spying thing and they were like "oh...."

The rest of the link is great tho.

[ThoughtCriminal]

42. But she did get the Republican nomination for Senate

The GOP has no clue. Despite the overwhelming baggage, disastrous corporate "leadership", they pretty much assume that if you are rich, you should be worshiped.

[apnu]

43. That she paid for out of her own pocket.

Real confidence booster huh?

Maybe she can run with Trump. Two ego maniacs, and not one clue.

[MindPilot]

30. On Bill Maher, she brought up income inequality as a big problem.

First show of the season, Carly was on the panel and completely out of context, started talking about income inequality and what a big problem it is.

When I stopped laughing...what the fuck would she know about income inequality?!...I knew then she was running for something.

[Attorney in Texas]

31. Was she saying income equality was a big problem because there was not enough inequality or too much

[Iwillnevergiveup]

40. Michael Hiltzik

is right up there with Frank Rich and Paul Krugman as far as I'm concerned. A true journalist and truth teller.

K&R