Posted on 07/12/2010 2:30:20 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Former Intel Corp. CEO Craig Barrett on Friday defended the decision by GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina to lay off thousands of workers and ship jobs overseas as a necessary business move when she was head of Hewlett-Packard Co.
Barrett is part of a coalition of business leaders who have signed statements supporting Fiorina as she tries to unseat Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer in California, who is seeking a fourth term. Others include Robert Bolingbroke, retired president of The Clorox Co., William Harrison Jr., former chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, and Peter Magowan, former president of the San Francisco Giants.
The response came after Boxer held a two-day, statewide campaign tour this week criticizing Fiorina as a failed chief executive who laid off about 30,000 workers and shipped thousands of jobs overseas during her tenure, which ran from 1999 to 2005.
"As CEO of HP, Carly Fiorina made a choice to lay off thousands of workers while she shipped jobs overseas and took huge bonuses and perks for herself," Boxer campaign manager Rose Kapolczynski said in a statement Friday.
Barrett, who served at Intel the same time Fiorina led HP, told reporters Friday that the bursting of the dot-com bubble forced high-tech businesses to streamline and restructure to remain competitive. At the time, he said sales orders fell 30 percent, lower-level assembly jobs were migrating to Asia, and Fiorina was in the midst of engineering a merger with Compaq Computer Corp.
"When you add those three things up, her actions to move jobs offshore or in fact to lay off people, were absolutely required to keep Hewlett-Packard in business," Barrett said. "And she really, I think, had no choice. She had to have this stiff back and to take those actions to preserve the enterprise."
(Excerpt) Read more at google.com ...
For those who don’t remember Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO at Hewlett Packard, here’s a short history :
In 2001, Fiorina pushed for a merger with Compaq in a stock deal valued at more than $20 billion. The proxy fight that ensued pitted her and her management team against heirs of the company’s late founders, including David Packard and Walter Hewlett.
Fiorina’s success as a leader at HP has been debated. HP’s board of directors ousted Fiorina in February 2005, giving her a severance package of $21 million. She was succeeded by Mark Hurd, who is often credited with turning HP around.
its all the taxes and regulation that are pushing jobs overseas. You can’t blame private companies of moving them overseas to cut cost when they could not compete with oversea companies. Theres only two options of them. Die if they stay locally or survive moving overseas
not much consolation for some but a lot of other companies and CEOs experienced similar changes/mergers/acquisituions .. no decision is too lightly taken.. she was smack in the middle of a big one..
not often when you have two women running much less two from the business side of things.. and as candidates for the Pubs , no less.. never mind both Dem incumbents are old grizzled hags already.. time for Change, heck yeah.. just so neither one ‘liplocks’ with McCain .. ugggh.
No brainer.
How bout all the Americans that have lost jobs while Senator “Prune Face” Boxer has been in the Senate? Boxer’s record of leadership is abysmal and catastrophic. If a Senator were held accountable for performance she would have been forced to resign years ago.
If Fiorina had what it took to lay off workers and invite unpopularity, she will have no problem laying off thousands of CA state workers who are draining the tax-payer dry.
Vote her in!!
Fiorina is running for the US Senate - which is not a line-management position for the state government of California.
Suppose you and I are passengers in a car, and the driver is heading into a ditch. I grab the wheel and steer a car back. Angry at what I said back in a bar, you throw me out, take the wheel and arrive home safely. Upon your arrival, your neighbor credits you with saving the car (and all involved) from accident.
That's what your post amounts to.
However, her skills would be even better used at the Senate level with Federal employees!
She is subsequently thrown out of the car (HP) for whatever reason (I am not suggesting that this was wrong: if her personality was such that others could not work with her, the board and management are impeded, and she becomes a liability to the company. That may well has been the case). The new CEO successfully steers the car (HP) home. Upon arrival he is celebrated for saving everyone.
The point is, of course, that, regardless of the premises, the reasoning itself is illogical. The success of the merger must be compared not against the subsequent events --- those are difficult to attribute -- but against the alternative --- that which would have happened had Compaq not been acquired. Most people judging Fiorina do not understand even principles of strategic management. But those that do cannot really judge her either: to be able to do so, one had to be privy to discussions occurring at the time and the data available at that time. Only senior management had that privilege.
I apologize for the previous post being too sketchy and confusing.
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