The Carly Chronicles

Given enough time, Fiorina believed, she could fix everything. HP's earnings and stock price were down since her arrival, but that was true of almost every high-tech company. She was withstanding the industry slump better than most. In the abstract, founders Hewlett and Packard were still her heroes. But after the HP-Compaq merger battle subsided, she largely stopped talking about the founders. It was as if she had put them back on the mantelpiece, protected with dust covers. Instead, she cited two different companies, unbidden, as examples of enterprises that got it right. They were Microsoft and IBM, the powerful pragmatists.

"Technology is more than an engineer's game," Fiorina remarked. "That's where Microsoft has been brilliant. If you think about technology companies that have really led, they didn't fall too much in love with the technology." Someday, she believed, the rest of Silicon Valley would understand.

Fast Company senior editor George Anders (ganders@fastcompany.com) is the author of two previous books, Merchants of Debt (BasicBooks, 1992) and Health Against Wealth (Houghton Mifflin, 1996).