I generally try to stay apolitical here. I think that taking sides in elections and political issues when my focus is on management and organizational life can ignite ideological reactions that polarize people and make it hard from them to talk about the merits of management ideas and evidence. In the case of the upcoming California election, I generally won't take sides here and in fact, for the Governor's race, I find both candidates so unattractive, that I really can't decide who to vote for (Indeed, governing the state is an impossible chore, so perhaps it does not matter). But it will be very difficult for me to vote for Carly Fiorina (who is running for U.S. Senator against Barbara Boxer). Besides the clear public record of her missteps and narcissistic actions at HP (see the Fortune article that was the final blow before she was fired), I had a lot of contact with HP executives during her reign and have since had a fair amount of contact with former HP executives who worked closely with her. And what I have learned is not encouraging, at least given my ideas about the things that effective leaders do.
In particular, as I discuss in several of my books, including Good Boss, Bad Boss, a hallmark of bad bosses is that they "shoot the messengers" who deliver bad news. This is exactly what one fairly senior HP executive experienced when he delivered some alarming news to Carly. I first heard about it the day it happened, as I had dinner with with the executive that night. He was very upset as he felt that Carly was blaming him for the bad news that he was delivering about customers' low opinion of Compaq products — the company that HP was in the process of merging with. As Hard Facts reports on page 160:
Hewlett-Packard (HP) insiders told us they were flabbergasted to
discover that HP had done no research on how consumers viewed Compaq products
until months after HP CEO Carly
Fiorina announced that the two firms intended to merge. Fiorina was unhappy to
hear that consumers viewed many Compaq products as among the worst in the
marketplace and saw most HP products as far superior to Compaq’s products. But
this information was only considered long after HP’s top management and board were committed to the merger and after
Fiorina had told her top management team that she didn’t want to hear any
dissent over the merger plans.
Mergers unfold in strange ways and perhaps it was not possible to perform the due diligence about products earlier (although I am skeptical about that) but the disturbing part about this executive's story was that, following the long-standing tradition at HP that facing the facts and using them to make decisions was expected of everyone, even when the facts aren't pretty, he was was hurt and a bit dumbfounded for getting "beat-up" simply because he was reporting the findings from some careful research. Perhaps this story is not representative of Carly's behavior or, if it is, perhaps she changed her ways. But regardless, it provides a cautionary tale about how NOT to react to bad news for any boss.
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