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Tough Choices: A Memoir (平装)
by Carly Fiorina
| Category:
Memoir, Business, Management, Career success |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
MSL price:
¥ 168.00
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
Ego. Boardroom politics. Career dilemma. This is an insightful and revealing biography that will allow you to gain glimpses into the dynamics of executive world. |
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AllReviews |
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Paul Allaer (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-29 00:00>
Let me state upfront that I am not an HP employee or ex-employee, and in fact that I have nothing to do with HP (unlike quite a few other reviewers here it seems, and their impartiality is doubtful). I knew of Carly Fiorina only what I had seen and heard in the business press and media during her 5+ tenure as CEO of Hewlett-Packard. About 18 months after being dismissed, Fiorina publishes her memoirs.
In Tough Choices, Carly Fiorina brings her life's story. What is absolutely fascinating to me is how someone so unfocused in her college and early career years would slowly but eventually work her way up through the ranks of AT&T and Lucent Technologies (being named the Most Pwerful Woman in Business in 1998), and eventually become the CEO of one of America's icon companies (in 2000). Fiorina gives detailed accounts of all the key moments as her star continues to rise, pulling no punches and naming names. The last third part of the book details Fiorina's 5+ years at HP, including the tumultuous merger with/acquisition of Compaq, including the proxy fight with the HP founding families (after their representatives on the HP Board had approved the merger, no less!). As one could expect, she uses the book to basically build the best possible case for herself in retrospect. To an extent, any autobiography is self-serving, and I don't have a problem with that as such. What surprises me is how quickly it all unfolds and falls apart at the end.
Fiorina gives great insights on what it takes to succeed in the corporate world, and what it takes to provide leadership. One may or may not agree with Fiorina's track record, but it's hard to argue with what she accomplished, working her way up from being a secretary at a real estate company to become the CEO of HP. I enjoyed reading Tough Choices and recommend it for anyone interested in insights to the corporate world.
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Thomas Banfield (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-29 00:00>
Tough Choices is a four-star book for the most part. Much of it is five-star. Some will read and enjoy it because it shows what kind of a woman it takes to break the "glass ceiling," others because of Carly Fiorina's in-depth descriptions of what it is like to become a member of the higher echelons in corporate management, whether man or woman. For me, I found it also to be the closest thing it could be to a business school textbook, albeit not written for that purpose.
Although written as a memoir, it answers better than most textbooks many intriguing questions such as, what constitutes good leadership, what in a person's background and upbringing helps create good leaders, how to motivate people, how to manage change, how to find the paths to better performance, how to improve internal operations without losing out in satisfying the customer, and many other issue business schools would like to be teaching. Alert to business schools as possible required reading for students and they will find a lot of material here for case studies.
Fiorina does a fine job of describing the difficult environment at the corporate board-of-directors level, as example, in her own words, "...navigating through the thicket of personalities, ambitions and emotions..." that had during a critical period after the Hewlett-Packard and Compaq merger "... become both draining and counterproductive." As to corporate boards, how many of us who have voted our stock shares to elect directors, did not realize that we might have elected people who, as the author describes some of them, are "amateurish and immature," or "are bored and distracting during important agenda items?"
It is easy for a reader to complain about the length of certain passages and some repetition of dealing with some management issues, but this is a memoir and tough issues keep coming up throughout a business lifetime. These negatives just cause me to give it four stars rather than five.
On May 24, 2006, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "So, was Carly right after all?" After reading Tough Choices, my conclusion is, yes she was right. But read the book and decide for yourself. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-29 00:00>
I was an HP employee after the Compaq merger and had worked prior to that at both Digital and Tandem. Those of us with this "pre-merger Compaq" background found that being a part of HP was very much a mixed blessing. Carly Fiorina was both CEO and Chairperson by then, and this book provides a view of what she thought she was doing, which is quite different from what those of us in the trenches were seeing. Still, it is well written and provides insights into how hard it is to "re-invent" (or whatever phrase you prefer) a large bureaucratic organization with many competing interests and hidden agendas.
What struck me as the biggest disconnect between the book and what we saw was Carly's emphasis in the book that "strategy and execution are two sides of the same coin." Nice phrase. Too bad she didn't actually do it, though it seems she thought she did. Her strategic visions were always compelling, though of course they changed from one marketing campaign to the next (from "leading technology company" to "all the world is digital, virtual, etc, etc"). So maybe you can't really call them strategies. But far worse was the execution. There was no accountability. There were matrix orgainizations everywhere. We saw the sales force sandbagging every quarter, mentioned this up the line, and were told to shut up. We saw the "42 longs" in the senior management ranks and marveled at how long they got away with non-performance. We saw that 65% of our operating expenses came from assessments over which we had no control. When we complained, we were called "whiners" and told to live with it. It's this kind of stuff that Hurd has fixed.
Then there were the small irritations. In the book, she complains about people being overly polite and not airing their true feelings. But it was clear in meetings with senior executives that certain questions were unaskable. When some poor soul would dare to ask something "embarrasing", they were castigated on-the-spot in public. This happened many times, by Carly herself in several instances. People aren't so stupid as to make that mistake very often. And the airplanes. Carly complains in the book that people didn't like the fact that she had a corporate jet on call. That wasn't it. What people didn't like as that HP had 5 corporate jets and that, at the time when there were layoffs and budget cuts, internal announcements came out about what a good idea it was that HP would sell the two Compaq jets and buy two new jets that matched the three existing HP jets in order to save on maintenance costs. No mention of living with only three jets when everyone else was flying coach, even on 14 hour trips to Japan.
In the end, Carly didn't meet her commitments. That's why she was fired. She blames sexism. Nonsense. She promised to fix HP in three years. She claimed publically that she had done that. Everyone internally knew it was BS, and the Board eventually figured it out too. Since Mark Hurd has taken over, he has done the basic execution that Carly never did. Was she right to buy Compaq? I say yes. The computer system leadership in HP is now coming mostly out of the Compaq heritage (of course, printers, which is pure HP, does fine as well). But it took a real nuts-and-bolts execution person - Mark Hurd - to complete the fixing of HP. The Board did the right thing.
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Richard Stoyeck (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-29 00:00>
I have spent 35 years associated with Wall Street in one way or another. During that course of time and before, I was fortunate to have met hundreds of individuals who run what are referred to as the Fortune 500 companies. I have also known heads of state, finance ministers, and scores of Nobel Prize winners.
The average American passively spends 4 to 5 hours a day (down from 6 hours prior to the Internet) in front of a television hoping for a good program. One out of every 8 adult Americans watches Wheel of Fortune every day. For close to 40 years, I have spent that equivalent amount of time reading 6,000 to 7,000 books, including several hundred related to business personalities. I put Carly Fiorina's book right up there with any of them.
I have met most of the players in this book on more than one occasion. Having been associated with two major investing banking firms in my career, these are the types of people who must travel down to Wall Street and look to raise money.
Both Fiorina and her book are the REAL THING. You seldom encounter such authenticity in a book, such a willingness to be open and describe the pain of the situation you encounter. She was also vivid in her portrayal of the corporate life, a life I shunned years ago, as a life not worth living. The fourteen hours days, the all niters, the weekends away from family and personal pursuits, it's all there for you the reader to understand, and more importantly understand emotionally.
Fiorina should be required reading.
Several times per year, I talk with my associates at Harvard University and tell them what they should be reading, and what they should be teaching. Fiorina's book should be REQUIRED READING for anyone taking a management course, or contemplating a career in management.
Every woman's studies program in America should have this book front and center in their program. If you want to know what it is like for a woman to work herself up the corporate ladder in a so called "man's world", this is the book for you. She points out situation after situation where men say things that they just wouldn't say to a man, and shouldn't say to a woman. In recent years, such acts and statements would lead to the dismissal of the offending employee, and potential litigation.
Life is about CHOICES, the ones made, and the ones not made as well. This is a book talking about a life of choices. There are those who argue that such a book is self-serving. All books are SELF-SERVING, and that is part of the Faustian bargain, we make with the author every time we open a book. We are only hearing Carly's version of what took place. Many times in a court room, the judge has limited information to work with also, but the judge must determine what is true, false and self-serving. The discerning reader can pretty much come away with the truth of the matter after delving deeply enough.
I have been involved with situations that resulted in press coverage on more than 200 occasions in my career. Not once did I recognize the story in the press with the one that I personally participated in. How accurate do you think the selective rendition of a 50 year plus life is going to be in a 309 page book? That's not why you read a biography. You read a book like this, to step into the author's shoes and live her life on her terms. You then come away with a feeling for yourself, as to whether this was a life you could have lived on your terms.
Clearly, Fiorina has had a fabulous life with its ups and downs. A world-renowned psychiatrist explained a concept to me many years ago. There are cycles in life. The hope is that the down, or trough of each cycle is higher than the trough of the previous cycle. You just don't want to take yourself to zero each time, that's a path of suicide, and leads to misery.
With Fiorina's very public dismissal from Hewlett Packard we have a person in a down cycle, but she is finding herself in a new life cycle. For those who choose a corporate life, I have found they are no different for the most part than the mindless worker ants that permeate the military staffs of most countries. Not so with Fiorina. Listen to the cadence of her words, and in her voice.
"I was attracted to L'etranger; by Albert Camus... I decided to take as many philosophy courses as I could... Hegel had as profound an effect on me as Camus... I studied ethics and learned that questions of right and wrong could be nuanced and complex, requiring rigor to unravel... I studied logic and discovered that disciplined thought processes and well-structured questions are as powerful as the answers... So I studied ancient Greek-to read Plato and Aristotle-as well as Latin, French, and German."
This is a woman that took a highly developed intellectual mind into the business arena and made it happen on her own terms. More than 100 pages of the book are devoted to building a career foundation at what became Lucent Technologies. From there we swing into what happened at Hewlett Packard from the day she started, to the day she was summarily dismissed by the Board of Directors.
Was she dismissed for incompetence, or ethical violation of common business practices, as Patricia Dunn of HP was recently for the illegal investigations she participated in? The answer is no. The problems that HP is experiencing right now could NEVER have happened under Fiorina because this lady is just too ethically centered to have allowed this to happen.
I'll let you in on a secret, which I know to be true. Corporate culture always starts at the TOP, and takes its cues from the top- NO EXCEPTIONS. I was with the oldest investment banking firm in America in the late 1970's, early 1980's. The partner in charge of my division was a tyrant; nobody believed the way he acted. One day, late at night, I was on the investment banking floor and heard screaming. When I looked around, I realized my supervising partner; a man paid millions per year in those years was being berated, and belittled by the senior managing partner of the firm.
I realized right there that no matter what happens in an organization, the behavior can not be too far removed from the behavior of the person at the top of the pyramid. There are no exceptions. This is why HP's current ethical problems could not have happened under Fiorina's leadership. She had a very strong ethical code instilled by good family values. Such a code does not break down under adversity, it comes to the forefront - it asserts itself.
It is also clear that this superstar executive is responsible for HP's turnaround, and not the current team. Turning around a huge corporation is like turning around an aircraft carrier. It takes 10 plus miles to turn a carrier, and it takes a plan to do the same for an organization. The current management team was in not in power long enough to have effectuated such a turn, that is how you know it was Fiorina's plan that did the job.
The Dismissal - When you SLAY the King, you must make sure he's dead
Ms. Fiorina violated the first rule of power. When you are strong you attack. When you are weak, you wait until you are strong. She did not place her own hand picked people on the Board of Directors to protect her flanks. She had several years to do it. This was her undoing.
Most Chairmen are adamant about changing the composition of the Board, once they attain power. You don't want to be thinking about who's trying to do you in, while running a company with tens of thousands of people. This was her fatal flaw, and she paid a high price for it. Disney's Michael Eisner overstayed his effectiveness at Disney for years, because he CONTROLLED THE BOARD.
Having read the book, I believe Fiorina thought inappropriately that smart, gifted people would DO THE RIGHT THING in the interests of the corporation. Nothing could be further from the truth. She believed in the meritocracy of the mind, that good would prevail. It just isn't the way business works, not at a low level, not at a high level. People are in it for themselves. Executives who fly around the world in corporate jets are just as petty, and foolish in their decision making, as the guy who takes a subway to work.
She should have seen it coming, and prevented it before it happened. She should have had eyes and spies on the Board. Instead, she relied on the good judgment (poor really) of a few self-serving men, who were Brutus to her Caesar. It happens every day across America, and always will
The Last Laugh.
This is one special person. We have not heard the last of her. There is too much life and substance in this woman for Hewlett Packard to be her last milestone. She will be back, either leading another big turnaround, or perhaps a political life.
You need to read this book to understand what its like to give your whole life to a corporate entity, and then wonder was it the right thing? What did I sacrifice? What did I forfeit? What could have been, had I chosen differently? Read the book, you are in for some ride. |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-29 00:00>
Carly is a talented executive who made some big mistakes at HP. She could learn from them and move on to be a great executive, but she doesn't appear willing to acknowledge her mistakes, much less learn from them. She throws a lot of blame around in this book seems blinded by her own arrogance. I personally hate when people talk about making "tough choices" as if it shows gutsiness, or proves character. I'd rather hear some discussion about making correct choices, or informed choices. Since Carly is reported to be considering a run for office, this arrogance and disinclination to accept responsibility or blame for bad choices, should be kept in mind.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.) |
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-10-29 00:00>
Having lived through the Carly era at AT&T/Lucent, she definitely has a revisionist, rather than unbiased, view of the impact of her actions. She is truly charismatic, bright and riveting to watch and interact with. Through her career; however, she has consistently made poor decisions in terms of contracts, partnerships, acquisitions, organizational structure - you name it. The key criteria was that it make a splash and look good at the time, although many of her key decisions had long-term negative consequences. (Note the vendor financing scandals at Lucent, which she excaped before that exploded.) The impact of those decisions never marred her reputation, as she was always on to the next rung of the ladder. Her ending at HP was inevitable and, even now, she can't see that she has always been about perception versus reality. It is a shame that such a talent couldn't have focused on real business growth and achievement rather than focusing on their self-promotion. In that regard, I find her to be very representative of US business (and other) culture where perception is everything. In the end, she does not represent a particularly uplifting model for female leadership, as she fully bought into the prevailing system, which desperately needs to be changed.
(A negative review. MSL remarks.)
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