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Carly Fiorina

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Factors contributing to Carly Fiorina’s meteoric rise: Carly Fiorina lead a Fortune 20 company and was actually the first woman to do this. This ranking was based on the importance of a woman’s work in the global environment, her influence in the company, arc of her career and her influence on mass culture and society. Quickly rising through the ranks of AT&T and Lucent Technologies, Carly Fiorina became one of the most powerful businesswomen in the United States. She was the group president of Global Service Provider business at Lucent Technologies Inc and was Mr Rich McGinn’s choice to be the executive vice president of corporate operations of the company. She had excellent sales skills and an ability to build consensus. She would take …show more content…

al. 14-31) Factors leading to her spectacular fall: Carly Fiorina made changes to HP’s culture. This was against what was being practiced all the way long. HP had been found by two engineers and its management methods had been praised over time (Ancona et. al. 14-29) as the company had set the standards by which other high-tech firms were judged. With the legendary success and reputation, HP was not keen in remaking the culture of the company. She made changes to the vision of the company as well by changing it from a company providing stand-alone products to a company that offered customers an integrated suite of information appliances, highly reliable IT infrastructure and e-services. In order to balance the changes in vision and strategy, she had to make changes in the organizational structure too. So she realigned it. (Ancona et. al. 14-30) She marketed HP’s new identity as well. (Ancona et. al. 14-31) She had never worked for HP before. The company’s founders were engineers, she was a marketer. Her expertise was not in operations, it was in sales and marketing. Her critics believed that Carly was a rude outsider who was not following HP’s established practices. She emphasized speed and suggested the merger between Compaq and HP. Some people felt that she was trying to do too much too soon. (Ancona et. al. 14-32) She had not been able to convince Walter Hewlett, a board member and son of co-founder of HP, the advantages of this merging and despite his

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