Jeffrey Sonnenfeld is Senior Associate Dean for Leadership Studies at the Yale School of Management and Lester Crown Professor of Management Practice and co-author of FIRING BACK (Harvard Business School Press).
She’s running for President on her track record as CEO of HP, but if that’s the case, Fiorina might want to rethink her strategy.
Fresh from strong debate quips, Carly Fiorina has improbably raced from 14th to fifth place in the New Hampshire Republican primary polls and now enjoys a 70% favorability rating in Iowa, ahead of such career politicians as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Rick Perry, George Pataki, and Lindsay Graham.
It is time to take her candidacy seriously and examine her leadership record. Having never held elected office, she has staked her reputation on her business career.
Fiorina is eager to be seen as the answer to Democratic slogans of a Republican war on women. She’s often been erroneously referred to as the first woman to lead a Fortune 500 firm, Hewlett-Packard HPQ 2.84% . That title actually belongs to The Washington Post Company’s Katharine Graham. Then there are the many other trailblazing women leaders preceding Fiorina, including Beechcraft’s Olive Ann Beech, Mattel’s Ruth Handler, Beatrice Food’s Loida Nicolas-Lewis, the Body Shop’s Anita Roddick, Martha Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey.
Still, with a scant 5% of Fortune 500 firms employing women CEOs, her leadership of a huge global enterprise in the macho field of IT is impressive. But how did she do?
The answer in short is: Pretty badly.
In 1999, a dysfunctional HP board committee, filled with its own poisoned politics, hired her with no CEO experience, nor interviews with the full board. Fired in 2005, after six years in office, several leading publications titled her one of the worst technology CEOs of all time. In fact, the stock popped 10% on the news of her firing and closed the day up 7%.
Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP’s founder, commented when discouraging voters from supporting Fiorina in her 2010 senatorial run, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”