As a presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina has built a reputation as an attack dog who relies on her business accomplishments to highlight the shortcomings of Hillary Clinton. But several people who have worked with and for Fiorina say the record she cultivated over the past few decades in business and politics suggests she should not hold higher office either.
A common complaint among critics who got to know Fiorina as a businesswoman or candidate for the U.S. Senate has to do with her management style. Former staffers on Fiorina’s failed 2010 campaign to dethrone California Sen. Barbara Boxer told the Washington Examiner she often delegated authority, and one former staffer said it appeared as though she would deliberately pit leaders against each other and then sit back and watch the battles unfold. Despite Fiorina’s expansive fortune, some campaign officials and consultants did not receive payment for their work until several years after the campaign ended. One consultant has yet to be fully reimbursed for his services.
Martin Wilson, Fiorina’s campaign manager during her Senate bid, disputed criticisms of Fiorina’s leadership. “I mean, we could quibble about how professional we were, we didn’t win, but I think she was very good in terms of delegating authority.” Wilson was owed about $60,000 several years after the campaign ended.
With a net worth estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars, Fiorina is one of the nation’s wealthiest presidential candidates. As the first woman to lead a Fortune 100 company as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she points to executive-level experience that no other presidential candidate can match. Before the dot-com bubble burst, the tech company solicited Fiorina while she was working at Lucent Technologies, a company spun off from AT&T.
Jeff Christian, a corporate headhunter for Silicon Valley, met Fiorina at a New Jersey Hilton in the late 1990s to lure her into accepting the HP job. Courting Fiorina was just a job for Christian, who told the Examiner he found “nothing” attractive about her potential as CEO, but pursued her at the behest of HP’s board of directors.
To understand who she is, Christian said, one must understand her family history. On the presidential campaign trail, Fiorina goes by “Carly,” a name that may sound more approachable to a national audience than her birth name. She was born Cara Carleton Sneed, her name resulting from a unique family tradition. All the male members of the Sneed family named Carleton died during the Civil War, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Each subsequent generation of the family named a child Carleton, if he were male, and Cara Carleton, if she were female.
“She’s not ‘Carly,’ she’s ‘Carleton Fiorina,’ that’s who she is,” Christian said. “She’s tough, she’s strong, she’s smart, she’s capable, and she could be a great leader.”
But she never became a transformational leader at HP, Christian added. Her signature accomplishment as CEO was the acquisition of computer company Compaq. While Fiorina fought for the merger, her leadership was under fire. “Some thought she only accelerated [HP’s decline],” during her first three years on the job, wrote Peter Burrows in Backfire: Carly Fiorina’s High-Stakes Battle for the Soul of Hewlett-Packard, published in 2003.
“Many employees feel HP is now just another company,” Burrows wrote. “They once felt obliged to speak their mind to management, but they are now distrustful or even fearful. The sense of company pride is greatly diminished.”
HP’s revenues doubled as a result of the purchase while other tech companies struggled to survive in the new millennium. But HP’s stock price fell 50 percent under Fiorina, while the overall market fell 7 percent, according to Yahoo Finance. Jason Burnett, grandson of company namesake David Packard, told the Examiner Fiorina harmed HP by choosing to act like a “superstar CEO.”
“She repeatedly put herself out there, and put her interests, from my perspective, ahead of the company’s interests,” he said. “As I see it, she did damage to a great company, and I don’t want to see her bring that same leadership style to our country.”
In a statement to the Examiner, Fiorina indicated that her time at HP taught her how to reform the federal government.
“Coming from a world outside of politics where track record and accomplishments matter, my experience as CEO uniquely qualifies me to understand what it takes to reimagine a broken, entrenched bureaucracy,” she said.
Fiorina has made many enemies as a successful woman in private industry. To survive a presidential campaign, however, she might need to overcome 30,000 of them. That’s the number of employees Fiorina laid off during her six years in charge before HP dispatched Fiorina in 2005 during what she describes as a “boardroom brawl.”
On the 2010 campaign trail in California, Boxer used the number to bludgeon Fiorina. In this election cycle, her opponents already registered the CarlyFiorina.org domain and used the website to show 30,000 frowning emoticons to represent the number of people laid off under her watch.
But Fiorina has heard it all before. In her 2006 memoir, she wrote that her critics have always sought to destroy her career.
“When I finally reached the top, after striving my entire career to be judged by results and accomplishments, the coverage of my gender, my appearance and the perceptions of my personality would vastly outweigh anything else,” she wrote. “It is undeniable that the words spoken and written about me made my life infinitely more difficult. Perhaps others’ words define me more clearly than my own actions.”
Since officially entering the GOP primary last month, Fiorina has answered more than 500 questions on the campaign trail, and RealClearPolitics’ average of national polls shows that less than 2 percent of Republican voters’ support her candidacy.
