After reading Joe Nocera's brilliant column yesterday I decided not to post my own review of the Fiorina book (I'd been waiting a week so Publishers Weekly could have it exclusively, which is I think what I promised them). Joe did a better job and I was too easy on the book. But since friends keep asking, here it is (restoring some of my language pre-PW edit), just promise to read Joe's column first.
Tough Choices/A
Memoir by Carly Fiorina
Fiorina may have had Tough Choices. But readers have an easy one: skip pages 10 through 149 and read the Hewlett Packard story first. If you become a Carly fan, then go back and read the first half.
Carly Fiorina, the famously fired CEO of HP, starts her memoir with a tedious telling of her rise through the corporate ranks. After plowing through her years at AT&T and Lucent, it’s still not clear exactly what the business challenges were – the only thing she expresses clearly about Lucent is her fondness for the “bold, red logo.” The chapters are filled with numbing passages like this: “In other words, our value-add would be to get everyone on the same page. Any organization is stronger when people are aligned to act together, instead of working at cross-purposes." Perhaps someone told her that the market for the book is middle management, so dumb it down, sound humble and fill it with advice.
When the story turns to HP, more of Fiorina’s management views and talents are visible. She vividly dissects the company’s business, board and structural problems. She makes a compelling case for why she deserves some credit for the 2005-6 turnaround. She’s less compelling when she claims that her introduction as CEO of HP was marred because “the one question we didn’t prepare for was the question most frequently asked…As hard as it may be to believe, we didn’t prepare for one question about my gender.” (Uh-huh.) When Fiorina dishes the board members, it’s delish: especially when citing Jay Keyworth’s stated belief that “anyone who had leaked confidential Board conversations to the press shouldn’t be allowed in the boardroom.” (A wonderful irony since he initially refused to resign during the recent HP scandal when it was revealed that he was the source of leaks.)
Much of what she writes about the Board will be in the news around this book’s release, but her revelations are valuable beyond gossip – because shareholders are demanding accountability from boards, it’s fascinating to be inside a deeply dysfunctional boardroom. And it’s just plain fun to read her settle some scores here. (I wish my editor had let me include more of that kind of backstabbing.)
While I didn’t come away with a sense of Carly Fiorina’s personality -- much of what she writes about herself personally is either unconvincing or mealy-mouthed – her book does shed light on the complexities of running a giant corporation. And I learned that I’d bought into media coverage of Carly Fiorina that was superficial at best, and misleading at worst. I owe her an apology for that, and she owes her readers one for not hiring (or heeding) a good editor to make her message less tedious.
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