HP sauce good for gander

Carly Fiorina

The memoir of fallen Hewlett-Packard leader Carly Fiorina, once the United States' most powerful woman chief executive, paints an unsparing picture of the internal power struggles and gender politics that prefigured such a public corporate boardroom scandal.

Tough Choices is Fiorina's long-awaited return to the public arena after she went silent in February 2005 following her sudden firing as chairwoman and CEO of HP, the computer and printer maker.

Publication of the memoir coincides with the filing of felony charges by Californian officials this week against former HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, who helped drive Fiorina out of HP and took over the top post.

Dunn and four others have been charged with felonies and are accused of spying on journalists and HP directors in one of the year's biggest corporate scandals.

Running through Fiorina's narrative of becoming the first outsider to run Silicon Valley's original high-tech company are fresh details of the infighting and embarrassing press leaks that set the stage for later corporate witch hunts.

"Beyond the leak, there was much about the board's dynamics that was disturbing," Fiorina writes in a book meant to appeal to the women's self-help crowd. Chapter headings include: I Can and I Will, Saving my Tears and Owning my Soul.

The book breaks with the anodyne genre of corporate autobiography that is typically long on management philosophy and short on personal revelation.

She pulls no punches criticising former colleagues, board members and underlings.

The fact of being a woman leader in a male-dominated technology culture figured heavily in these spats, she writes of her tenure at HP from 1999 until last year.

Dunn emerged as HP's new chairwoman and the public face of its board in the weeks leading up to hiring of new CEO Mark Hurd.

Fiorina draws a picture of constant infighting, pitting what amounted to a Silicon Valley male establishment against women executives - with some male allies - whose world view came from their corporate experiences outside the high-tech world.

As she tells it, she faced off against the modern equivalent of a "good ol' boys" network who bonded over technology rather than more traditional male pursuits.

Among them were board members Tom Perkins, a legendary venture capitalist, and Jay Keyworth, President Ronald Reagan's science and technology adviser - both of whom were later identified as leaking HP board discussions to the press.

They were "big-picture guys" who "loved the minutiae of technology" but "were impatient with the details of what was necessary to actually get something done".

She writes: "Like many technologists, they recognised and liked their own kind but weren't particularly perceptive about, appreciative of, or interested in people who were different."

In an extensive discussion of the board, Fiorina bemoans the shift in power after 2003 and the retirement of a set of board members with extensive experience in corporate operations - men such as Phil Condit of Boeing and former phone executive Sam Ginn - who were also her allies.

"They knew a board cannot operate a company. They knew a small group of individuals can sometimes go off track. They provided ballast and perspective to the board's discussions," Fiorina recollects.

She describes a proposal by opponents to split HP in two - separating its corporate enterprise products from its consumer businesses - as an unnecessary intrusion by the board on her role as CEO in running the company.

"From my perspective, their suggestions came out of left field and were half-baked."

Not only had revelations by board opponents of her plan to merge Compaq Computer into HP nearly derailed that major deal in 2002 but leaks in early 2005 about the possible split up of the company set in motion her firing two weeks later.

In response to those leaks, board member Larry Babio, vice-chairman of Verizon Communications, proposed the whole HP board resign and Fiorina choose a new set of directors.

"No one argued" when she proposed in an emergency Saturday morning board meeting that an internal probe seek out the source of leaks to the Wall Street Journal.

In this initial probe, Perkins disclosed he had been one source of the leaks. Dunn, whose criminal charges stem from a leak probe a year later, was on vacation and missed the call that approved the probe.

Fiorina writes: "I thought this could be a useful wake-up call to several board members who were not as smart as they thought they were.

"[It] turns out I wasn't as smart as I needed to be. Somehow, at some point during the next two weeks, certain board members would decide to fire me."

- REUTERS