Succession Planning at HP: Analysis of the role of Carly Fiorina
In July, 1999 Hewlett-Packard appointed Carly Fiorina their CEO after and extensive search that included 100 potential applicants, carefully screened by the board of directors (Anders, 2003). What the HP board was after was a new CEO who would keep the passion for innovation alive in the company and unify its core businesses of printers, scientific instrumentation and computing equipment (Burrows, 2005). Carly Fiorina was an outsider who impressed the screening committee with her brash, direct communications style and her track record at AT&T for taking on difficult projects and turning them around (Burrows, 2005). The following is an analysis of how the succession was handled, what Carly Fiorina chose to concentrate on during her years with the company, and the lessons learned by HP from the experience.
Analysis of the Carly Fiorina Succession at HP
Carly Fiorina came into HP when the company was in disarray, having lost its vision as a unified company. Ms. Fiorina, an outsider, had to be frequently debriefed on just how badly the PC division was completely disconnected from the urgency of the market conditions (Anders, 2003). The sales force was in disarray and there was frequent channel conflict throughout all organizations, which led to the comp[any losing significant time on critical deals (Burrows, 2005). HP was also being completely overtaken by...
Ms. Fiorina chose to rely on Mr. Hackborn as her key advisor instead of getting out and walking around the company to see what was going on, learning first-hand where the disconnects were in the company.
Instead of concentrating on creating her own power base from a political standpoint, Carly Fiorina allowed herself to become isolated from the employees and other managers of the company (Burrows, 2005). Instead of building a strong base of support she chose to find the most pressing projects that had somehow been stifled or nearly canceled due to organizational efficiencies (Anders, 2003). This turned out to be one of the biggest initial mistakes in her succession strategy. Instead of immediately tackling business process re-engineering (BPR) tasks the best CEO successions concentrate on gaining a strategic overview of the company and looking to understand how systematically it is not working (Stanwick, Stanwick, 2011). Carly Fiorina did not have enough experience or insight into HP to begin making the decisions she made on initial BPR and massive structural changes, and this ultimately led to her failing as a CEO. Her initial decision to get the company back to its roots, complete with an advertising program aimed at featuring the…
