Yes, she was fired by Hewlett-Packard. But that says more about HP than about her.`
This article is adapted from an introduction of Carly Fiorina last week at the Maine Heritage Policy Center, where she delivered the Freedom & Opportunity Address.
According to our expensive and occasionally accurate opinion surveys, Maine residents know two things about Carly Fiorina: first, that she gives Hillary Clinton fits, and second, that she was fired from her last job.
We should note for the record that Hillary Clinton was not fired from her last job.
Not after she left employees unprotected in a U.S. consulate in Libya and then showed little interest in learning why they had been murdered. Not after she compromised or destroyed thousands of government documents to cover her political and financial tracks. Not after she accepted tens of millions of dollars for her private ventures from the same foreign interests she was negotiating with as our secretary of state.
No, Hillary Clinton was not fired. She served at the pleasure of the president, and Mr. Obama seemed well pleased with her performance.
Carly Fiorina springs from a different culture — a culture of achievement and accountability.
She graduated from Stanford in 1976 with a liberal-arts degree. She took a job as a secretary and moved on from there. Over the next two decades, she worked hard, studied at night, took risks, networked like crazy, and climbed, rung after rung, the ladder of corporate America.
By 1997, she had become group president of AT&T’s high-tech spinoff, Lucent Technologies. How often does that happen? How often does a young woman rise not from the management track but from the secretarial pool to the C-Suite of a billion-dollar public company? I don’t know, but I suspect that the answer is somewhere between not often and never.
She excelled in that job, as she had in her previous jobs, and took on ever greater responsibility.
In 1999, Fiorina was named CEO of Hewlett-Packard. It was a big story, one of the biggest business stories of the year. But the press got it wrong. They played it as “Girl to Run Iconic All-Boy Company,” as if her appointment had been an exercise in some form of gender reparations. Not even close. The real story was that Carly Fiorina had become the most sought-after executive talent in the tech industry.
The history of Hewlett-Packard is legendary. The company was started in 1939 by two Stanford alumni, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, in a Palo Alto garage.
That garage is now a national landmark — the birthplace of what the world came to know as Silicon Valley.
Over the decades, Hewlett-Packard grew into a giant corporation, a symbol of America’s technological might to the nation and the world — a proud nation, an envious world.
But in the predictable order of things, after 60 years in the global marketplace, HP was showing the symptoms of corporate sclerosis. The growth had dried up, and the competition had caught up. It was an existential problem, and HP’s previous CEO couldn’t solve it, nor could the management consultants or the business-school professors. Carly Fiorina was taking on a monumental challenge.
Carly Fiorina competed and won in a culture of achievement and accountability — in a culture worlds apart from the Beltway’s culture of fix and favor.
She didn’t gum the bullet. She cut costs, raised performance benchmarks, launched dozens of initiatives, and engineered a $24 billion acquisition to fill out HP’s product line.
In 2005, HP’s board, reflecting the impatience of investors following the dot-com bust, decided her results were not good enough soon enough and replaced her with another world-class executive — who, the record has shown, did not solve HP’s problems either.
So yes, Carly Fiorina was fired from her last corporate job. But that story line is misleading. The real story is that over the course of 30 years, Carly Fiorina built an extraordinary business career based on high performance. She competed and won in a culture of achievement and accountability — in a culture worlds apart from the Beltway’s culture of fix and favor.
And now, following in the grand tradition of HP co-founder Dave Packard, to the good fortune of the nation and the cause of freedom, and to the dismay of Clinton diehards and Republican debate rivals, Carly Fiorina has brought her many talents to public service. How far she will go along that road remains to be seen, but for now, she is indisputably a first-tier candidate for the presidency of the United States.
— Neal B. Freeman is a longtime contributor to National Review.