Ding Dong, the Mean Old Witch Takes Her Golden Parachute

BrooklynDodger has been following two business stories the last few days. One is a generic about a newly retired worker, trying to earn enough to make up for a pension tanking, forced early retirement, or reduced severance investments. The Times featured a worker forced out of Lucent.

The other story was Carleton Fiorina, forced out of Hewlett Packard with a mere $21 million severance.

An interesting coincidence is that Fiorina bailed from Lucent to HP just before Lucent tanked.

Lucent was spun from ATT. It was Western Electric, a world-class, US-based, unionized maker of electronics, and Bell Labs, a jewel of private sector basic and applied research. [Besides being a cradle of statistics based quality control, Western Electric was the parent of a plant in Illinois which coined the “Hawthorne Effect.”] Lucent is now 20,000 active supporting a pension for 120,000 retirees. Bell Labs, we don’t know what happened. ATT has now been bought out by a local phone company, another giant brought low.

Now to HP. The business uplift book, ”In Search of Excellence,” features HP. HP was an engineering company with the tradition of people sharing, of designers leaving their projects out on the bench so colleagues could learn and offer advice. BrooklynDodger’s thesis depended on an HP gas chromatograph.

So the Dodger had an atavistic hatred for the transformation of HP. The scientific instruments part was spun off as Agilent. A science company created by technicians working in a garage became a producer of commodity PC’s and Inkjet printers. The product became the stock. Fiorina was a business page diva as long as the stock held up.

This story has been played as the perils of female CEO's - not as rich as they might have been. Instead, it should be Fiorina's place in history as tanking two of the major corporate sources of scientific innovation.

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Hewlett-Packard Forces Celebrity CEO to Quit
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff WriterThursday, February 10, 2005; Page A01
Carly Fiorina, whose reign at the top of Hewlett-Packard Co. made her one of the corporate world's most powerful women, was ousted yesterday after failing to turn around the aging computer maker whatever happened to scientific instruments?? as quickly as its directors desired.
Some said Fiorina was forced to live up to impossible expectations because of her status as a high-profile female executive.

In 1987, the Palo Alto garage where Hewlett and Packard started their business was designated as a California State historical landmark. However, Agilent Technologies, not HP, bears the legacy of the original instrument company founded by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939. Agilent was spun off from HP in 1999.

Many long-time HP calculator users were surprised and disappointed when HP announced in March 2002 that the company would no longer manufacture financial and scientific calculators – a product line and, indeed, a market, that HP had started thirty years before. The decision was especially hard to fathom in light of the HP-48 graphing calculator range's success. However, despite its spring 2002 press release stating the opposite, the company nevertheless returned to the market during the fall of 2003 with several new models (flagship: HP-49g+) competing against similar offerings from competitor Texas Instruments.

In a report submitted by Saddam Hussein to the United Nations shortly before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it was revealed that Hewlett-Packard had participated in Iraq's nuclear weapons program. (Though the U.S. attempted to redact the names of all U.S. companies involved, an uncensored copy was leaked to the press.)