Fall of a corporate rock star

As a chief executive who never minded the glitz and glamour of her position, Carly Fiorina began 2005 with her usual steely-eyed gusto.

Aside from continuing to chart the future of Hewlett-Packard, she had the World Economic Forum in Davos to look forward to. Once that was over, she was booked to spend a day at the White House hobnobbing with peers and the President.

And when Fiorina put something into her diary, she expected it to happen. Few who cared for their jobs dared to get in her way.

Most famous was this from late 2001: "Buy Compaq Computer today".

That small chore took a little longer than she expected, thanks to virulent shareholder opposition - not least from a son of an HP founder - but she got there eventually and Compaq was hers.

Untouchable, however, Fiorina was not. Even Davos was not the party she expected. Reporters quizzed her about rumours regarding the state of her relations with the HP board. They were "excellent", she fired back, but no one altogether believed her.

But far worse was to come. Her appointment at the White House was for Wednesday this week - and she didn't make it.

Instead, she spent the day in her home in the Silicon Valley Hills, bodyguards in dark glasses stationed at the main gate.

As corporate firings go, the dumping of Fiorina by the HP board will forever rank among the most dramatic. It is not that Wall St was especially surprised - on the contrary, it rewarded the board's move by pushing up stock in HP by 7 per cent. Nor were there many people willing to argue the dismissal was unfair or unwarranted.

But it was nonetheless sudden (Fiorina could barely believe it). And above all, it was so brutally and mercilessly ignominious. Rock stars - because that is what she had become in corporate America - are not meant to be treated like that.

And Fiorina had become an icon for no better reason than she was a woman. She had broken the glass ceiling like no other female executive in America.

Maybe she should have heeded her father and become a lawyer. In fact, after getting her bachelor's degree in philosophy and history at Stanford University, she did study law but dropped out, switching to business studies.

Thereafter began a 20-year career in telecommunications, first at AT&T and then at the equipment business that it spun off and became Lucent.

While already admired for her hold-no-prisoners guts, Carleton Fiorina was hardly a household name when she joined a long list of candidates to take the helm at HP in 1999.

The top job at the printers and computers giant was open and the board was looking for someone to give it new energy.

Then 44, Fiorina was surely a brave choice. It was not that she was a woman - HP had a long record of nurturing female executives. More shocking was that she was an outsider being brought in to a company known for promoting from its ranks. And she was an outsider with no direct experience of any of HP's core businesses.

But if the board wanted someone able to deliver an electric jolt, she seemed the right choice.

She had demonstrated at Lucent that she could be charismatic and hard-nosed. Nobody minded when she began remoulding HP in her own image, casting herself in new television advertisements that had her posing outside the suburban garage where the company was conceived in 1938.

A personality cult grew around her and there were numerous and always flattering cover articles about her in the business magazines. She waltzed through the California social circuit. At one Oscar night, actor Warren Beatty told her he hoped his wife, Annette Benning, would play her if there was ever a film about her.

Gossip has always swirled that Fiorina would one day be bound for a political future.

Perhaps it was a bad omen that that first TV spot was something of a fraud. When its makers failed to win access to the real garage in Palo Alto, they had to build a fake one. But the real problem for Fiorina at the outset was that she was taking charge at a particularly tough juncture for the industry.

The tech bubble in Silicon Valley was about to burst, and HP's problems were serious and deep. It had a solid footing in most of the markets it was competing in, but was not dominant in any, aside from printing and imaging.

Fourth-quarter earnings in 2000 were way off target and the stock plummeted. In 2001, HP laid off 6000 workers.

Already by then, there was a division between those who had faith in Fiorina and others who did not and, in fact, could not abide a style they considered imperious.

Then came her biggest gamble - her pitch in September of that same year to buy the Texas-based Compaq. Many observers as well as company insiders suggest that while Fiorina eventually won the battle, she made too many enemies in the process.

Worse, in the period since Compaq was finally embraced in May 2002, almost nothing she promised from the transaction has come to pass.

Indeed, since then, HP's position as the top supplier in the US of PCs has been stolen by Dell Computer.

In recent months, Fiorina has been judged ever more harshly for her Compaq grab. The board became frustrated that Fiorina seemed unable, or unwilling, to accelerate a strategy to diversify HP's portfolio of products and services and pull it ahead of its rivals.

And so, on Sunday night, they met at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Fiorina was not invited. She was staying nearby and, on Monday, the startling news was delivered: please resign.

Fiorina always shunned attention based purely on her gender. But it has always raised questions extraneous to her actual performance.

She had 5 1/2 years to achieve the desired results. And didn't quite make it. She leaves HP, however, with the promise of sleeping better than she has in quite some time. And enjoying the pay-off guaranteed by her contract - a rather nice US$21 million ($30 million).

- INDEPENDENT