RUTHFULLY YOURS

    When she led HP through a bitter battle to buy Compaq in 2002, which itself had just gobbled up DEC shortly before, I thought it was a very risky move. Computer hardware was rapidly turning into a commodity manufacturing business, with Dell and the Chinese crushing older, highly integrated and high cost companies like DEC and Compaq, and HP was facing its own problems against lower cost competitors. Buying the combined Compaq/DEC looked daft. And it quickly proved to be a disaster, costing Carly her job.

    I then watched Carly run against Boxer in ’10 and was really pulling for her, because the Senate control could have hung in the balance. Boxer, who was terribly weak at the time and thought to be easy to knock off, crushed her. One of the big and highly effective points she used against Carly was the HP fiasco. Bear in mind that HP was a Silicon Valley icon and hence closely followed and well understood in CA. It was very hard for Carly to hide what happened from that electorate.

    With that background, I found my own impressions strongly reinforced by articles in the media. An important one came from Jeff Sonnenfeld, a long-time biz prof specializing on CEOs who wrote an article about her in Fortune, which you can see here (I may have sent you this one before). It basically agreed with my assessment above, but went into greater depth. It happens that Jeff was a classmate of mine at business school, so he and I corresponded about this. I’ll touch on that again in a moment.

    Then VC icon Tom Perkins came out with an ad in the WSJ (here, from Carly’s web site) in which he publicly declared that he had erred as an HP Board member in supporting Carly’s dismissal. I was surprised that he reversed his opinion so publicly and can’t explain why. Perhaps it was because, as someone (Trump?) said in the debate, that Perkins is simply hedging his bets. It can’t be because the numbers HP put up during Carly’s tenure got any better or that her strategy there was in retrospect any better. It’s worth noting that several articles have come out critical of Perkins himself and basically suggesting that he is an unreliable person on such matters. Here‘s one of those from the LA Times.

    Next came an article in Townhall entitled “The Conservative Case Against Carly Fiorina” by John Hawkins, evidently a very conservative writer who harbors a special animus towards Jeb. In it, he repeats some of what Sonnenfeld wrote, but in addition goes into her calamitous campaign against Boxer and, something I’ve not seen elsewhere, also details her primary campaign to get the nomination for the Senate. In that, he points out that she was the GOP establishment’s darling – not the quintessential outsider that she now poses to be – which really infuriates him. That’s all here.

    Then Sonnenfeld’s name was invoked in the debate by both Trump and Carly. Trump repeated a false statement about Jeff, claiming that he was head of Yale business school, which seemed intended to give greater weight to Jeff’s criticism of Carly. She then hurled back that Jeff was merely a well-known stooge for Hillary. (I know from my correspondence with Jeff that this is quite unlikely.) Both those misstatements caused Jeff to write another, more detailed, article about Carly, which you can see here. If you only read one article in this group, I’d suggest this one, since it is most current and trenchant.

    To all this, I’ll add some information from personal sources. I have a friend in northern CA who is a retired AT&T exec and who has lots of other friends from the industry, many of them HP vets. My friend thinks Carly was a disaster both as a CEO and as a candidate against Boxer, which he watched as an interested CA voter, and he has shared with me some emails from friends of his who feel the same way but even more strongly. I can now add to this Josh’s comment last night that he has a friend who worked at HP during Carly’s tenure and thinks she destroyed its collaborative culture. This is one of Sonnenfeld’s specific points about her poor performance.

    My overall take on Carly is that she is a tough, hard-headed woman with an enormous ego and an outsized opinion of her accomplishments, and she’s trying desperately to redeem her reputation from the HP and Boxer fiascoes. As a result, she is misrepresenting her career and her history at HP. That for me is a disqualifier. I actually am beginning to find her claims that Hillary is a liar irritating and think that they ironically might come back to bite her. I can imagine a Democrat campaign add listing some of Carly’s false statements and asking how she has the temerity to accuse anyone else of being a liar.

    But even if Carly got nominated, I think she would in fact get trounced (unless the Democrat opponent was incredibly weak, perhaps because somehow Hillary email problems caught up with her and either made her a hopeless nominee or brought in another very weak one). Here’s how Hawkins describes her vulnerability: “if you think it wouldn’t be incredibly effective to point out that Fiorina fired 30,000 workers, tanked the price of the company’s stock, damaged Hewlett Packard so badly that it has yet to recover and STILL walked away with 100 million dollars for being one of the worst CEOs of all time, you’re kidding yourself. For all of his flaws, Mitt Romney was a gifted businessman and the Democrats managed to falsely portray him as a heartless, greedy monster for doing far less than that at Bain Capital.” I also think that her failures at HP point to an intellect and decision making style that would be flat out dangerous in a POTUS. I wouldn’t want her in charge of our foreign policy, nor have her finger on the nuclear button.

    So, that’s my take. Based on what I’ve seen about her so far, I currently rank her down with Rand Paul in my hierarchy of candidates – but well above Trump.

    I hope this is somewhat helpful.