PORTFOLIO TOUGH CHOICES Carly Fiorina was president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005 and chairman from 2000 to 2005. Before joining HP, she spent nearly twenty years at AT&T and Lucent Technologies, where she held a number of senior leadership positions. She has a B.A. in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford University, an M.B.A. from the University of Maryland, and an M.
S. from MIT''s Sloan School of Management. Fiorina currently serves on several boards of directors, including those of Revolution Healthcare Group and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. She and her husband, Frank, divide their time between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. They have two daughters and two grandchildren. Tough Choices A MEMOIR Carly Fiorina Acknowledgments WRITING A BOOK involves tough choices as well. One of the toughest is what, and whom, to leave out.
As I thought about this book, and wrote this book, people and places and events flooded my memory. Many hours could pass in the company of these reflections and I would silently thank again the countless people who have made a difference in my life. I truly wish I could have named everyone, but a book is not a diary. For those who are disappointed by their exclusion, I beg forgiveness and hope they take some small comfort in my struggles to edit and reedit-careful to preserve the authenticity of the memoir, while recognizing that not everything is of relevance to the reader, even when it matters deeply to the author. I was not sure I wanted to write this book at all. So now, I want to thank those who believed in it from the beginning, who encouraged me to keep going, and who were blunt when necessary. Frank read and reread every word. My sister, Clara Sneed, the real writer in the family, offered sound advice early on in the process and read the second draft with a critical eye.
My sisters-in-law, Claudia Beyer and Ursula Feldman, provided unwavering support. And Deborah Bowker, Rollins Emerson, Kathy Fitzgerald, Barbara Marcin, Dan Plunkett, Carole Spurrier and Richard Ullman all gave their time, their care and their candor to me and to this book. Finally, and especially, Adrian Zackheim has my deepest gratitude and appreciation. Prologue IN THE END, the Board did not have the courage to face me. They did not thank me and they did not say good-bye. They did not explain their decision or their reasoning. They did not seek my opinion or my involvement in any aspect of the transition. Having asked me to come to Chicago for a meeting, they left me waiting in my hotel room for more than three hours.
As I waited, I knew whatever came next would be a turning point. After I finally received the call to rejoin the meeting, I thought about each Board member as I rode the elevator down past those twenty-four floors. I didn''t know what to expect, but I assumed I would be facing them. I wasn''t prepared for the empty conference room I entered. Only the two designated messengers and a lawyer remained in the room. The chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee said, "Carly, the Board has decided to make a change at the top. I''m very sorry." I knew he had opposed my ouster.
And then the new chairman said they wanted my help in "positioning" the news. She said they thought I should describe this as my decision: I should say I thought it was "time to move on." I asked when they wanted to make the announcement. "Right away." The meeting lasted less than three minutes. I asked for a few hours to think and I left the room. I believe the truth is always the best answer, whatever the consequences. Less than two hours later I sent a message to the new chairman saying we should tell the truth: the Board had fired me.
When the announcement was made, I simply said, "While I regret that the Board and I had differences over the execution of the strategy, I respect their decision. HP is a great company and I wish the people of HP all the best." I had always known I might lose my job. I was playing a high-stakes game with poweful people and powerful interests, but I had not expected the end to come in this way. I knew we were on the verge of reaping tremendous benefits from all our hard work, and I thought the Board knew this too. I wanted so much to be able to gather my team one last time and tell them how proud I was of all we had accomplished together. My heart ached that I was not given an opportunity to say good-bye to the people of HP, whom I had grown to love. I knew the announcement would be big news.
I was a woman, and a bold one at that, and things had always been different for me. All the criticisms that had ever been leveled against me would be recycled and thrown back in my face with new delight: "She''s too flashy." "She''s just marketing fluff." "She''s too controlling." "She''s a publicity hound." "The merger was her idea and it was the wrong thing to do." "She''s imperious, vindictive and employees didn''t like her." The coverage would go on and on, and the critiques would not be balanced against the facts or my contributions or the positive changes that had been made.
It would be ugly and it would be personal. I knew all this as I steeled myself for the public announcement on February 9, 2005. The reality of the coverage was even worse than I had imagined. It hurt me, but it hurt my family and friends more. I felt lonely, but no lonelier than I''d felt for the past six years. I was deeply sad that fellow Board members I had known and trusted would not pay me the simple respect of looking me in the eye and telling me the truth. I felt betrayed when I considered that some Board members, having spoken outside the boardroom, had broken their duty of confidence to one another and to me. I felt all these things, but after a lifetime of fears I was not afraid.
I had done what I thought was right. I had given everything I had to something I believed in. I had made mistakes, but I had made a difference. I was at peace with my choices and their consequences. My soul was still my own. 1 A Gift from My Parents HOW A STORY ENDS has much to do with how it begins, and so I must begin with my mother and father. My mother, Madelon Montross Juergens, was the only child of a Ford Motors assembly-line worker and a lovely woman of French descent named Clara Hall. They lived in Rossford, Ohio, a town where many European immigrants gathered.
Clara Hall died of stomach cancer when my mother was only ten. It was, according to my mother, an agonizing death and was surely a profound trauma for a young girl. Her memories were of a beautiful, loving, refined woman of imagination who spoke often of France and wanted a cultured life for her daughter. Her father had other ideas. He was a stubborn, taciturn, deeply practical man who quickly remarried. Her new stepmother, whose name my mother never shared with me, was neither affectionate nor concerned about my mother, whose childhood became unhappy and lonely. When she became a parent herself, she refused to talk about it in any way, other than to praise her mother. It seems her life began only after she ran away from home.
She did so because she wanted to go to college. She had been her high school''s valedictorian, and so her guidance counselor told her father that his daughter was the one student in school who absolutely should go to college and offered to help him obtain financial assistance. Her parents quickly concluded that this was a frivolous use of money and not worth the effort. Neither of them had gone to college, and besides, she was a girl. So they decided she should stay in Rossford and work until she got married. My mother had different plans, and she left town on a bus one night without saying good-bye. At eighteen she joined the Women''s Army Corps, the WACs, as they were called during World War II, ending up at Shepherd Field, an air base in Texas. She quickly proved herself and became the secretary to the commanding officer, which was a very prestigious position.
It was there that she met my father. Eventually, when she was well into her sixties, my mother would earn both a bachelor''s and a master''s degree in art history. She would also take up her painting virtually full-time, ultimately completing hundreds of canvases brimming with color, energy and life. Today my home is filled with them. My father, Joseph Tyree, was born in a tiny Texas town called Calvert. His father, Marvin Sneed, a well-respected rancher and landowner, died of congestive heart failure when my father was barely twelve years old. Mr. Sneed seems to have been an outgoing adventurer, taking the family on cross-country road trips in a Model T Ford, way back in the 1920s.
His death created real financial difficulties for his family. And as devastating as the loss of his father must have been, less than nine months later, in September, my father''s elder brother, Marvin, died of a virulent infection caused by a botched tooth extraction. Marvin had been athletic, charming and good-looking, and clearly his mother''s favorite. My grandmother wore only black for the rest of her life and went into mourning for the entire month of September each year until her own death at eighty-four. The burden of being the only man in the family rested very heavily on a young boy''s shoulders. In contrast to his brother, my father was a small, sickly child, born with severely reduced lung capacity and one missing vertebra. His mother consulted many specialists about these physical difficulties (my father has called them "deformities" all his life). Ultimately the doctors told her that he should avoid physical exertion and that he should never play football.
But football was the rite of passage for all young men in Texas, and my father was determined to measure up. And so almost by sheer force of w.