Carly S. Fiorina: The Great Leader

Carly S. Fiorina: The Great Leader

By Bofei Shen

Carly S. Fiorina, who was born in 1954, is an American former business executive and a former California Republican candidate for the United States Senate. Fiorina was considered one of the most powerful women in business during her tenure at Lucent and Hewlett-Packard. In order to find the reason for her success, let’s review her whole business history of being a leader.

At first, Fiorina graduated from the University of Maryland, MIT, Stanford University, originally studying medieval history and philosophy. Before she entered into the AT & T in 1980, she got the MBA degrees from the University of Maryland. She got promoted from a secretary to be a manager, and then joined AT & T's sales of telephone services. In 1995, Fiorina participated in AT & T spin-off Lucent Technologies. In 1998 she was promoted to Global Chief Executive Officer of Service Provider Business Unit, managing a company's total revenue of 6 percent of departments. By the end of July 1999 she served as CEO of Hewlett-Packard to become the Dow Jones Industrial Average component, which is the only female president of the enterprise. At September 4, 2001, because Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer Corp. reached a value of up to 250 mergers and acquisitions trading, she was the new CEO of Hewlett-Packard. In early 2005, Carly ended a six-year career with Hewlett-Packard, unloading Hewlett-Packard Chairman and CEO positions. During as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she achieved excellent results and received praise from the majority of people. She had three times entered the "Fortune" magazine named the 50 strong women's column.

People really knew Fiorina is based on the book of “Tough Choices”, which is from Carly Fiorina published in October 2006. This book will beyond and reject to the prejudice of traditional businesswoman, show readers a true and strong Carly Fiorina. We all can gain more enlightenment from her tough choice during her life. In this biography, Carly presented the fact hiding behind the public, shared her successes and failure in this book, and also told us her fears and hardships of her life. Before I read this book, I had access to many online materials in order to know more about this famous woman. Once I simply start to read, I saw many complaint descriptions against HP senior managers which includes moodiness of director Jay Keyworth, unceremoniousness of Compaq’ CEO Michael Capellas, the copycat in HP Walter Hewlett and so on. At the mean time, she firmly believed that her CEO career in HP was a great success. This book also reflected her enthusiasm of teamwork, foresight and 100% concentration in career efforts. However, Carly did not calmly discuss about controversial successful tenure in HP with public said she bring a disastrous consequences. The office temporary staff was Carly’s first job. As an agent in a stock broking firm, her duty was busily to pick up the phone all the day. As Carly mentioned, she thought this job was full of fun, “I like this job pay attention to the nature,” she wrote, “the most important thing is that I like communicate with people in business world.” I especially admire her passion and dedication to work that learn from business school.