Saturday, February 13, 2010

Fiorina talking jobs?

I was astonished to read recently that Carly Fiorina was talking about creating jobs. This is part of her run for the US Senate.

I have a hard time with this concept. You see, I was at hp from 1976 until 2002. That was the year that Carly's objective of laying off some 17,000 people was realized.

The main point of having hp merge with compaq was to eliminate those thousands of positions. I would like to know why people think Carly knows how to create jobs, especially given her record of destroying thousands of them at hp.

She was a lousy chief executive, too, jetting around doing PR without ensuring someone was minding the store. But perhaps that wasn't entirely her fault; she was a marketeer from a fiber-optic outfit trying to be the CEO of a Silicon Valley icon. Maybe if the senate job is easier or smaller or more focused she'd be OK at it. Oh, and if the mission involves PR and laying people off, as distinct from doing something substantive and creating jobs.

So I don't get it. But clearly I'm out of step; this is the state that elected Arnold as governor.

Update: I wrote to Carly about this

The lovely Carol saw this post and said I wasn't taking into account Carly's conversion since that time. So I wrote a note to the email address on the website:
Date: Sun, 14 Feb 2010 08:31:11 -0800
To: contact@carlyforca.com

As a former HP employee (laid off along with at least 15000 others in 2002) I would like to understand if you regret the decision to merge hp with compaq. I have a very hard time understanding how you can talk about job creation when the stated reason for that merger was to eliminate positions -- i.e., destroy jobs rather than create them.

My wife tells me that you've decided since then to follow Jesus, which is a wonderful thing. But as far as running for the US senate on a platform of job /creation/, I would like to know what your current feeling is about the things you did while at hp, and also what experience you've had actually creating jobs rather than destroying them.

Sincerely
Collin Park
I'll be pleasantly surprised if I get a serious reply.

No comments: