Tim Worstall: Carly Fiorina

リンク: Tim Worstall: Carly Fiorina.

This Guardian piece about Carly Fiorina is terribly revealing. Not quite in the way she whould hope though:

As her heels click purposefully through the lobby of a plush Chicago hotel, guests' eyes flicker with recognition. Carly Fiorina was the face of the world's biggest personal computer maker - and the most powerful woman in corporate America - until she was booted out by a male-dominated board last year.
...
Fiorina recently suggested, in cryptic terms, that her dismissal from HP, ostensibly due to a plunging share price, was to do with her gender. She insists sexism still pervades public life. "We characterise ... caricature ... describe women in positions of authority differently from men. That's a fact,"

Mmm. Fired because she was a woman, eh?

Not everybody accepts Fiorina's account. During her tenure at HP, the share price almost halved and growth was slow. A New York Times business columnist, Joe Nocera, argued last week she was fired for being bad at her job: "The notion that she was blindsided or treated badly because she was a woman, as she now insists, is just ludicrous."

Male CEOs do indeed get fired for such performance. It also appears that she is appallingly ill informed:

"I believe companies should make a positive difference to the world. When 52 of the top 100 GDPs [economies] in the world are companies, of course companies can make a big difference."

That simply isn't true. You cannot, if you are in any way numerate, compare the turnover of a company (or its market capitalization) with the GDP of a country. It is economic illiteracy. You can, if you wish, compare value added (profits) with GDP, but then you most certainly do not get 52 companies in the top 100. By that latter measure Exxon is around and about the size of Luxembourg: fair enough really, as they've also got round and about the same number of people.

Oh, and did you notice? Carly's got a book out.

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October 28, 2006 in Business | Permalink

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Comments

Yes, she won praise for defining a new vision but generally she is considered to have fallen short on day-to-day operational matters, unlike Mark Hurd. My recent series contrasts her style and Patricia Dunn's. Hers can be summed up by the header I gave it, 'They were down on me as a woman.'

Posted by: james higham | Oct 28, 2006 12:25:22 PM