Hp Under Fiorina's Control example essay topic

Can Anyone Save HP? Seminar March 24, 2005 In today's world of corporate America, mergers, acquisitions, takeovers, scandals, immoral business practices, poor management, etc., are issues we hear and read about everyday. For the most part, it seems that the scandals and negative issues over shadow the beneficial and positive activities in the business world since they are more often than not given more media attention. For instance, immoral business conduct within ENRON, and insider trading issues that swirled around Martha Stewart were headline news for months. CEO's aren't safe from the media barrage either. Michael Eisner, former CEO of the Disney Corp. was in charge of the corporate mega-giant and wanted to make the company so over-diversified only out of self interest.

By doing so, he thought he would be issuing himself job security, because for Disney to find a successor, that was as knowledgeable about all of Disney's holdings lime Eisner was would be an impossible task. And for Disney, finding a successor will be difficult, yes, but they are doing everything in their power to remove Eisner completely from the company for his shortcomings. With that said, there has been another high profile CEO that has been in the news an awful lot lately, and that's Carly Fiorina. Carly Fiorina made headline news many years ago, in a good light, by becoming the first woman CEO of a major corporate company. Life for Fiorina couldn't get much better. She was in control of one of the world's largest imaging and printing giants, traveling all over the globe, and presented herself as this very well educated, and highly successful business woman.

In the beginning, Fiorina had huge plans for HP, but a number of miscalculated business deals, numerous character flaws, and other untimely miscalculations ultimately lead to her demise and firing from HP. One of the main miscalculations that Fiorina made was that upon arrival at HP, she was battling HP's deep rooted company culture everyday. Since Fiorina was the very first outsider to ever head HP, she made the critical error of letting her Lucent Technologies based company culture clash with that of HP's, and ultimately favoring her former employers culture rather than try to adopt and perhaps slightly modify the culture that was already in place at HP. While battling against the HP culture, she took it upon herself to take 80 plus autonomous business units HP had in place, and thus streamline them into 4 divisions, laying of tens of thousands of employees in the process. So after witnessing that, it gave HP employees the crystal clear picture that Fiorina really meant business.

It was mentioned in the article that Fiorina was one of the absolute boldest gamblers in the tech industry, and to me that was a huge gamble on Fiorina's part right off the bat. Another mistake that Fiorina made, which ties in with the first mistake that I mentioned, was the fact that Fiorina took yet another gamble of taking the layoffs to the next level. After ousting tens of thousands of workers, she then set her sights on many executives and top level managers. People, who in HP's eyes were great assets to the company, but sadly they were expendable in Carly's eyes.

These were individuals, who upon e laving HP, went on to become top level execs at other major HP competitors. So by this time, employees at HP were most likely feeling that they had no sense of job security at all, since Fiorina ruled with such an iron fist, and with the knowledge of her strict game plan for heading HP. And whatever needed to be done, would be done. She was so infatuated with her strategy, she would not let anything get in the way of her accomplishing exactly what she wanted to with HP. That brings me to Fiorina's last really big gamble that went super sour for HP, and that was the acquisition of Compaq. Granted, in the early stages of the acquisition it seemed to be a great idea: combine the industry leader in printing / imaging with one of the most recognized and dependable computer makers.

Fiorina anticipated for the possibilities, as well as the profits to be endless. But Fiorina was sadly mistaken. Upon the acquisition, there were setbacks and people who didn't quite agree whole hearted ly with the deal. Many insiders at HP felt that with Compaq now in the mix, efforts would be taken away from Hp's core competency, which obviously is printing / imaging, and would be shifted over to the PC division. This became such a problem, that director Walter Hewlett actually raised so much of a fight, that the case was brought into court. Fiorina had so much power and clout, that she actually had the courts find Hewlett to be wrong, and then had him ousted from the company that his grandfather founded.

Moving forward, Fiorina didn't really do much with Compaq to make the division at all profitable. The article mentions that HP was working on two different processors, which turned out to be unsuccessful, thus wasting millions of dollars of r&d on an idea that fell flat. Also, the PC division was never able to get out of Dell and Gateway's shadow. Everybody knows that in our day and age, consumers prefer to buy Pcs that they can custom tailor to their exact needs and desires. A concept that Dell and Gateway have had runaway success with for years now. But Fiorina never decided to implement that strategy with her PC division.

Perhaps, she should have done a lot more research, and found out that custom built PCs are all the rage, and then maybe acquired either Dell or Gateway, which in my opinion would have been a much better choice then Compaq. And who knows, maybe if she acquired either of these two companies, she may still be the CEO of HP today. One last issue that ties into the mistake of acquiring Compaq is that Fiorina let a bad thing, which was going no where, interfere with a perfectly great thing, and that great thing was the printing division of HP! She had to have seen that the Pc division was going nowhere, but yet she kept pumping millions into the program to try and get it jump started.

Dell entered the low end market in early 2003, and has been gaining more and more market share quarter by quarter - a huge long term threat to HP. HP hopes to counteract Dell's progress by staying innovative. After reading this article, I gained a greater understanding of numerous issues in management in corporate America. For one, it is definitely a possibility that a company can become over diversified.

The article states that HP is simply trying to accomplish too much. Proper management and needed resources are critical when a company becomes as large as HP, and its clear that HP possess neither, and thus can't keep up with its competitors. Much like the Disney / Eisner example I aforementioned. I strongly believe that Disney and HP should have simply stayed with what they were good at - and that is theme parks and animated features and printing / imaging respectively. Fiorina failed to realize that. Maybe acquiring Compaq seemed like a good idea at the moment, but Fiorina failed to realize that long term it may not be such a great idea.

One other aspect I took away from this article was the simple concept of being able to accept blame. So many of the issues that went wrong in HP under Fiorina's control were her fault in some way or another. For example, how the article stated Fiorina blamed company culture for many early problems she faced. So Fiorina tried to remedy that by implementing the culture she had knowledge of from Lucent, but that backfired as well. So many of her miscalculations were management shortcomings, mostly which were her own - but yet she failed to admit to them. Being able to accept blame, I believe is a huge part of being a manager, as well as being someone who is employed in the business world.

If you are heading a project, or simply doing a task your boss asked you to do, and if something should happen to go wrong with it - simply admit you did a poor job, and ask for help to see where you went wrong.