More Clowns in the Car?

     So.... Carly Fiorina has thrown her bra into the ring of the circus that the ever expanding list of Republican presidential hopefuls have become. While she's not in the clown car (reserved for Carson, Paul and Santorum), she is worth a closer look because she seems so poised , so self assured, so....."competent?" All this of course, while leading with a jab at Hilary Clinton, criticizing her "lack of leadership skills.'

       The truth is, she has been such a failure as a businessman (businessperson?)/leader  as to make Neil Bush look like Warren Buffett.   Carly Fiorina was a one-woman wrecking crew during her tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Running on her executive experience, it is hard to see how Fiorina can square her professed executive aptitude with the fact that as H-P CEO for six years between 1999 and 2005, she single-handedly came near to sinking what was widely considered the world’s best technology company.

       At H-P Fiorina was responsible for an ill-fated merger with Compaq, as well as firing nearly 30,000 employees and sending tens of thousands of jobs oversea. Never short of  hubris, Fiorina referred to the latter  as “Right Shoring,” meaning sending US jobs overseas was somehow for the greater good.  In 2005, Fiorina was finally fired, and given a $20-million dollar settlement to just go away. (and some wonder why  Senator Warren  decries  "corporate excess!") In response H-P share prices bounced back by 10% in a single day. About Fiorina’s service at H-P Arianna Packard wrote, “I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded.”

        While  many know of her H-P escapades,  Fiorina was involved in a much more damaging business disaster, one that America will continue to pay for over generations; the destruction of the Bell Laboratories. Beginning in 1995, Fiorina took over as the head of corporate operations of the AT&T spinoff, “Lucent Technologies” which included  Bell Labs.

         Bell Labs, it was Ma Bell's gift to America, a place where monopoly telephone service was offset by a research business that employed over 25,000 scientists, engineers, mathematicians and researchers. At  Bell Labs, research was considered an end unto itself. The output of this gold standard research facility included such major technology  breakthroughs as the transistor, the silicon microprocessor, the laser, fiber optics, the communications satellite, the UNIX and C++ computer operating systems. In the pursuit of improved communications, serendipity occurred such as in the form of the confirmation of the “Big Bang” theory which won physicist Arno Penzias a 1977 Nobel Prize. Penzias, the retired Bell Labs vice-president for research, put it best when he said,  “one of the great luxuries of  Bell Labs is that we don’t always need to get it right.” Bell Labs did get it right enough to amass more than 25,000 patents.

       That all began changing in 1995 when a corporate team that included Carly Fiorina descended on the Bell Labs and began to pull the plug on pure research. It was Carly Fiorina who lead the purge which let the scientists at Lucent know that they had better start looking for ways to “productize” their research.

        What she left behind at Lucent/Bell Labs (when she left to trash H-P)  was a smoking ruin of what had been the world’s most important and productive research lab, an organization responsible, in no small measure,  for giving America the post-World War II boost that helped make the nation the world technology leader. Bell Labs  contributed mightily to the prosperity that Americans took for granted but which came in no small measure from the pure research as practiced there.  By insisting that every piece of research be tied to a product, Fiorina and her ilk helped prevent a new generation of scientists from looking out over the far horizon and bringing back the kind of benefits that have come from such then-seemingly useless technologies including the transistor, laser, fiber optics.

        The correlation between Fiorina’s ill fated tenure at the Bell Labs and the decline of American technology is tragic and is not coincidental. Despite the millions she will spend  on media to convince voters otherwise, Fiorina, already a failed California Senate candidate in 2010,  is one of a disappointingly large number of  one-dimensional corporate bottom feeders whose only answer to fixing the bottom line is to fire thousands of people rather than finding creative ways to use the immense brainpower that could be used to grow a company and a nation during  economic hard times.

        Republican  voters and any others who are tempted to be swayed by her  "I'm a tough, successful executive"  swagger, should reconsider. Carly Fiorina’s purge at Lucent and disastrous tenure at H-P highlight her as the kind of retrograde executive a still-recovering U.S.  economy cannot afford to elect to higher office. Fiorina has already proven to be an uncreative corporate drone and an unmitigated catastrophe for American business and technology. 

     In an economic climate where many bemoan  the lack of good paying jobs, Fiorina killed roughly 50,000 of them while at Bell Labs and Hewlett-Packard. Hell, imagine what she might propose as president! So far she has  shown herself incapable of mastering  either long-term strategic thinking or the ability to coexist in a collegial decision making environment.   That creativity was absent  when Fiorina was at H-P and certainly not when she was at the Bell Labs. It is a similarly tough stretch to imagine a "President Fiorina" bringing anything but her "killing touch" to politics and governance, in any setting, never mind the nation's highest elected office.