I mean, I would assume so, too? After all, when a CEO gets hired, it’s often because they are espousing a vision that the company has already embraced (or wishes to embrace in the future)… But that’s part of the problem of how we often view everything through a lens of individual agency at the expense of the larger social and cultural forces that shape our lives - that we attribute almost everything to the actions of individuals, rather than looking at the larger forces at play in any given situation.
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Absolutely - we as a society love the myth of ‘great men’ (it’s almost always men) when organisations do well, and love a good scapegoat (often a woman) when things go wrong - even when there are clearly systemic problems or a pre-existing direction of travel. The likes of Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, Musk and so on… good subjects for hagiographic bibliographies, but little else.
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Fari enough, but I will preface by admitting I probably not an unbiased source: I interned at HP Spain (where they used to develop and test all the printers we love to hate) and my opinion comes mainly from the friends I made there (most of them old school engineers that practically were there from the beginning - plant was opened in 1985, IIRC).
So… regarding your question of “was HP downfall Fiorina’s fault or did she was only the scapegoat of the shareholders and HP was already on a downward spiral” I would reply “yes and no”.
HP was badly hurt at the beginning of the 90’s. They lost a lot of military contracts, the instrumental division was losing market to new companies, and too many R&D efforts went nowhere or not fast enough. They brought Packard out of retirement and he managed to pull off some major changes by launching a line aimed at the “home end user”, and was quite successful, at that.
But (and here I enter oral history that may not be true) Platt (the then CEO) and the shareholders were in big disagreement about what to do with the unprofitable divisions, like instrumental, medical, etc. These divisions rely a lot on government contracts which they were not winning. So Plat decided he could not keep everyone happy and hires a replacement to provide outside perspective.
The replacement agrees with the shareholders, and they spin off the unprofitable divisions (which compounded with the late 90’s crisis, they would take quite a long time to become profitable again). Platt retires, and the replacement becomes the new CEO.
So… Fiorina entered the company at a moment when HP should have been most profitable. But also at the beginning of the dotcom crisis. So it was not an easy case to manage. It would have been a moment to probably concentrate on core products and be judicious with the spending… but that was not the case.
Against shareholders wishes she pushed forward a costly merger with Compaq that left HP cash reserves depleted, and brought almost nothing to the table: Compaq had a decent server division, but also a lot of unprofitable baggage adquired from previous mergers (like DEC’s mainframes).
So I would say she was quite instrumental in crashing HP.
That’s not to say the replacements were better: the next CEO, Mark Hurd, was a fucking tool who turned a profit by going full Austrian School on the company. Fiorina cut down most of the R&D, leaving only “practical research” (ie: minor improvements, but nothing that will be groundbreaking in 5 years, or what in spanish say: “killling the milking cow”), but Hurd practically closed down all R&D departments and started putting pressure on maintaining the company as lean as possible (or, again: “grinding the sowing seeds”).
So. I can’t provide a definitive answer. I still feel Fiorina was largely responsible on steering the company into a stall from which it could not recover without sacrificing all it was. But on the other hand, save from the Compaq merger, much of the blame that is put on her can be attributed to Platt or Hurd.
I will still say that. I don’t thing is underserved. As I said before, she behaved like a superstar and made enemies both from the workers AND the shareholders. Most CEOs know at least to keep one of the sides happy and the other slightly annoyed.
Again, this is a not a defense of her leadership, it’s a pointing out some facts. 
I know you’re not defending her leadership. But I don’t think the argument that “she did not CAUSE the downfall of HP single-handedly” is really a good one.
Musk did not single-handedly brought down Twitter: the company was bleeding cash, the founder did support Musk adquisition, Saudi money was involved, and even found some stooges to cooperate with him inside the company once he took over.
And yet I don’t see anyone (well, except Musk fans) that Musk is not bringing down Twitter. Heck, we have a full thread pointing out how many companies Musk is ruining!
So, if your sole point of argumentation is that. Okay, she did not CAUSE the downfall of HP single-handedly.
But she inherited a company that had cash reserves, had recently spun off the unprofitable divisions and in the black. And in 5 years she managed to burn the cash reserves, and put the company almost in the red. And most sources agree that her management was against shareholders wishes.
So in my books that is the closest to “single-handedly” that a CEO can ruin a company.
(except for Musk. Musk is like speed-running the “ruining a company single-handedly”)
Except that it’s true. I’m not saying she didn’t play a role, but she was not the singular cause.
Yes. That. I’m arguing that the shift to short-term thinking in corporate American and then in Europe under neo-liberalism takes a major part of the blame here… Ideologies around the capitalist system shifted since the 70s, and Fiorina was merely one of many CEOs promoting these ideas, which have been fairly destructive, especially for workers, the environment, etc, etc… She’s a byproduct of the era in which she lives, and she’s hardly the only one to embrace that mode of thinking. If it had not been her, it probably would have been some other asshole doing similar things to “shake up” the company…
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I cannot disagree with your argument, after all Hurd was not much better (though he started from a worse position). We cannot prove or disprove that if Hurd (or any other successful CEO from the 90’s) was in Fiorina’s position would not have tried to do the same. We’re talking about the people who let the dotcom happen because it was profitable for them, after all.
I still think Fiorina’s tenure left the company in a position from which it was very difficult to recover. She’s clearly in the ranks of Apple’s John Sculley and NCR’s Bob Allen.
yeah, yeah… that’s my point!
maybe, maybe not. We can’t say for sure, as it’s a counterfactual… But I think it bears thinking about the larger patterns, and how (especially in the US) POC and women are often brought in when times are tough, and how that shapes our views of leadership by POC and women.
Either way, the larger shift to short-termism is the ultimate culprit, and Fiorina was its handmaiden at HP specifically, so to speak. I think it does us a disservice to disconnect figures like her from the larger patterns that has taken hold on the global economy since the 70s. It covers up far more than it reveals with just a focus on her as an individual CEO.
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