The Carly Chronicles

"Someday, there will be books written about what we're doing, Carly Fiorina declared in 1999. She had just joined Hewlett-Packard as its new chief executive, the first outsider ever chosen to run the high-tech giant, the highest-profile female CEO in the United States. Her strategic and operational mandate: to breathe new life into a proud but aging company and to successfully execute one of the most audacious business transformations of all time. Over the past few years, Fiorina's tenure at HP has become a case study in more ways than she ever expected. Early on, the new boss seemed to be conducting a master class in leadership, winning allies and taking steps that made HP nimbler, leaner, and more exciting. Then the economy turned south, and some of her boldest bets misfired. She was held up as a paragon again, this time of hubris and insensitivity to the company's deep-seated culture. Then she masterminded HP's $20 billion acquisition of arch rival Compaq Computer Corp. in the face of fierce resistance, a strategic move that was packed with lessons about crisis management and the changing future of the high-tech sector. All along the way, Fiorina has sat in the celebrity-CEO chair, competing in a high-stakes industry, leading a time-honored company, working in the intense environment of Silicon Valley -- and doing it all with the added scrutiny that comes with being a woman at the top.

In Perfect Enough: Carly Fiorina and the Reinvention of Hewlett-Packard (Portfolio, 2003), Fast Company senior editor George Anders pieces together the full story of Fiorina's epic struggle to navigate HP toward a viable new future without renouncing its storied past. This excerpt presents five crucial scenes along the way, dramatic moments that illuminate both the challenge that Fiorina has faced and her approach to tackling the task. The story begins with an inside look at Fiorina's candidacy for the job and culminates with her candid views on the tech sector in the years to come.

Carly Wins the Job
In October 1998, a burst of publicity made Carly Fiorina a prime candidate for a CEO job. She was a top executive in the telecom industry then and one of the new faces of female leadership in the United States. Her boss, Lucent Technologies chairman Henry Schacht, offered her some pragmatic advice about recruiters' calls. "It's not disloyal to think about alternatives," Schacht said. "But you owe it to yourself -- and to our company -- not to get distracted by the wrong kinds of offers. Decide very clearly what you would pay attention to. Don't talk to people about anything less."

Over the next seven months, Fiorina ignored a drumbeat of recruiters' pitches, tossing their message slips into the garbage. Finally, a persistent caller reached her office line in the evening, after all of the secretaries had gone home, with a breathless message: "Hi, this is Jeff Christian. Don't hang up. I'm calling about Hewlett-Packard." Fiorina paused. She savored his opening line for a moment. Then she said, "Well! You've got my attention."

A few days later, Fiorina and Christian lunched at a back table in an obscure New Jersey Hilton, seeking to avoid attention. Christian was in the early stages of screening 100 candidates for HP's board as it sought to pick outgoing CEO Lewis Platt's replacement, and he wanted to hear about each one's career challenges and triumphs. Whenever candidates abandoned their corner-office reserve and began telling rich, dramatic stories from the heart, Christian knew that the allure of a new job was magically taking hold. Partway through the meal, Fiorina entered that zone.

"What struck me," says Christian, "was that in her career, she constantly had been sent into troubled situations. And at every junc- ture except one (a Lucent-Philips joint venture to make telephone handsets), she had been able to fix things. She had a methodology. She would go into an area and spend a lot of time listening at first. She was a big believer that organizations already contained a lot of the right ideas. People just didn't feel as though they had the authority to get them done."

Two months later, Fiorina emerged as one of four finalists for the job. The crucial interview would be with Richard Hackborn, a key director and retired HP executive who had built the company's enormously successful printer business. They met at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, at a restaurant decorated like an imitation speak-easy. Within minutes, they were talking about HP more bluntly and more affectionately than either had expected.