Fiorina Exiting Hewlett-Packard With More Than $42 Million

[LiviaOlivia]

The New York Times
February 12, 2005
Fiorina Exiting Hewlett-Packard With More Than $42 Million
By ERIC DASH

Carleton S. Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, will receive a severance package worth about $21.4 million, and stands to gain at least $21.1 million more.

The additional amount reflects the estimated value of her pension, stock options and Hewlett stock holdings, which the company did not include in her severance package.

Ms. Fiorina was forced to resign Tuesday after the board concluded that she failed to reverse Hewlett's sagging stock price and accelerate the company's turnaround after the merger with Compaq Computer.

~snip~

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/12/business/12hewlett.html

[Erika]

1. She bitched like hell

at any and every employee benefit.

[barb162]

20. I know a guy who worked there about 30 yrs and he hated her. He

got a buyout about 2 yrs. ago and is still working there as a consultant. He is hoping to get rehired. He always felt HP was a tech company and tech people ran the company; she didn't really care about tech and what tech people had to say, just marketing

[bluedeminredstate]

2. Rewarded for what they say is

FAILURE!!! Obscene amount of money to fuck something up so bad.

:grr:

[jmowreader]

3. She lasted far longer than she would have if I was on the board

If I was there, her ass would have been gone the second she proposed the Agilent thing.

Hewlett-Packard was founded as an instrumentation company, and spinning the instrumentation division off into Agilent just destroyed the company. Now Agilent is making good money and H-P is another me-too PC builder.

The sickest thing about the Fiorina reign? There's serious profit in instrumentation; there is very little (if any) profit in the PC business. (There is currently no profit in the printer business; the consumer/low-end business printer business model everyone uses now relies on selling the hardware at a loss and making up the difference by overcharging for ink cartridges.) The people who buy instrumentation are willing to pay for R&D because many of them are in the R&D business themselves; people who buy PCs are willing to walk on you for a nickel. And she kept the division that sells to the walkers!

HP's main hope for redemption is as follows:

1) Spin all of their PC products off into another company. Call it Compaq, if you must.
2) Re-merge with Agilent under the condition that the re-assembled company be called HP.

[MSgt213]

4. Companies give rank & file employees $25-35 K when they cut them off

at the knees after about 17 - 18 years with the company. This usually happens when the company doesn't have anything on the employee to fire them outright. They often to this to employees who they want to avoid paying modest retirement benefits to, since these employees are often close to being eligible to retire when it happens to them. They then hire younger workers at lower wages to replace the older experience ones.

Mean while exes with less then 1 - 6 years with a company are raping the companies for this kind of money and that's okay with people.

[barb162]

18. the boards of directors are there because the shareholders ok them

the stockholders have to start getting their dander up don't they? After this (her huge parachute), you would think they'd vote this board out. Let's see if they do

[Redstone]

7. Amen to that

When I did business with the "real HP" back in the 1980s, they had a policy of hiring the smartest people they could find, paying them very well, and leaving them alone to do their work.

From what I understand, this policy continued in the printer division after the Agilent spin-off, and the printers carried the rest of the company financially--so what did they do? Fold the printer division into the dogfight, profitless PC group.

It's a sad evolution for a company that was once the envy of many others in the electronics business.

I cannot for the life of me fathom why a profitable test-equipment company decided to turn itself into just another Intel / Microsoft reseller of cheapo PCs. What the hell were they thinking?

Redstone

[jmowreader]

11. The same thing SGI was thinking in the mid-nineties

Silicon Graphics makes extremely fast and extremely expensive Unix-based computers. They don't make many, they don't sell many, because most people don't need to do what SGI machines are made specifically to do. The last time I rendered an entire Hollywood movie or precisely simulated a nuclear blast was...ummm...never. But that's what SGI's customers do. But the people who do render Hollywood movies and simulate nuclear blasts buy these machines by the carload.

In the mid-nineties they hired a new CEO who decided he would increase sales at SGI by transitioning the whole company from Unix on 64-bit MIPS processors to Windows NT on Intel. This is what happened:

1) The current SGI user base was utterly confused and thoroughly pissed because they had a shitload of money tied up in their code base. Someone who gets heavily into workstations will replace the $25,000 box every year or so, but he'll be reticent to replace the $125,000 program that's running on it. (Think I'm joking? You can call discreet on Monday morning and order a copy of Flame. It will run you about half a million dollars. 'Course, you'll turn around and bill a million a month from it, so it's not a bad investment.)

2) The new users SGI was trying to attract--mainly graphics types--got a look at the computers before they shipped and thought they were just dandy. Then they got a look at the price tags...you gotta be shitting me, Joker, who in hell was going to spend $11,000 for a Windows NT workstation when fucking IBM (the high-priced spread at the time) was selling the same box for $2500? And one that didn't need a special version of Windows to kick off the graphics subsystem, to boot! (SGI's graphics subsystem--it was soldered to the motherboard, so "graphics card" is inappropriate here--hooked into the OS far deeper than a driver could reach, so you needed a special version of Windows NT--shades of the old Tandy 2000, TI Professional Computer and all the other "PC Compatibles" from the 1980s that required a special version of MS-DOS and special MS-DOS programs because they wouldn't run the IBM-standard version.) Publish Magazine did a head-to-head comparison between the SGI 340 and the Apple Power Macintosh G3/450 (the top Mac at the time); they said you could produce a lot of work and make a lot of money on the SGI, but you could produce twice as much work and make twice as much money on the Mac because for eleven thousand dollars you could buy two Macs AND get change back.

3) The corporate people SGI was trying to lure took one look at the avant-garde cabinets on the SGI 340 and SGI 540 and decided they weren't beige enough. Gotta keep the rank & file in lockstep, y'know. Can't let one guy think he's better than everyone else just because he has a pretty computer.

The SGI 340 and 540 computers didn't sell. Fortunately for them, the board figured out this new CEO was a crackhead for thinking of this crazy-ass Windows NT shit and got rid of him quick.

But hey! You can't sell spectrum analyzers at Wal-Mart and as everyone knows, the true measure of success in American business is getting your products on the shelf at Wal-Mart so some asshat in Bentonville can decide how much money you'll charge for your products.

[Redstone]

12. Thanks for an enjoyable trip

down Memory Lane. I had forgotten the SGI saga, though now that you mentioned it, I do remember reading the Publish magazine comparison.

Redstone

[joeybee12]

5. She was an incompetenet leader, and a Repuke to boot!

Great example of someone working entirely on her image so that her failures don't make it into the press.

[hatrack]

14. There was an article on her replacing Snow at Treasury

Yeah, that would fit right in with the Bush MO to date - fuck up, send the company tits up, and move right in to the corner office. :eyes:

[barb162]

19. screwed up Lucent too; amazing how these "top" people keep

landing on their feet.

[sendero]

6. My wife insists...

... that were she a male CEO, she would have left with many times that amount.

I don't know enough about such things (and don't want to know) to have an opinion.

The top-heavy compensation packages most corps have make me somewhat ill though.

[Zynx]

8. $42 million is above average for an ousted CEO.

[sendero]

9. I thihk..

... she had heard the report on NPR which cited a figure of $21 million.

[Zynx]

10. Even so, most CEOs don't get much more than that.

I've followed this stuff for years. The argument that Fiorina was being underpaid because she was a woman is bullcrap. She was overpaid for being a craptastic CEO.

[mitchum]

13. Poor dear, how will she ever get by on that pittance?

[applegrove]

15. Disgusting!!!

[area51]

16. Carly Fiorina

Don't forget, she said that American workers have no right to expect employment in this country, & the asswipe traitor loved to offshore U.S. jobs.

---

"Prosperity is just around the corner." -- Herbert Hoover
"The economy has turned a corner." -- GW Bush

Herbert Hoover = GW Bush

Neither man cared about the Depression their economic policies created.

[Kimber Scott]

17. This is why I want to put my social security money in the stock market.

So people like her can have more. It's what democracy is all about.

[daleo]

21. The price of failure is high.

But, she will accept her shame, gladly, if it makes workers understand the glory that is "creative destruction".