Thursday, October 1, 2015

Carly Fiorina Likely Has Not Learned From Her Failures Enough To Succeed And More About Steve Jobs and the HP iPod

Here is a very good look-back post from Medium penned by the author Steven Levy who had written a book at length about Apple's iconic iPod and how Steve Jobs rolled over Carly Fiorina and HP to get the iPod into the dominant position it was years ago and even through today.  The focus came about because during the second GOP debate on CNN, Fiorina opportunistically mentioned Steve Jobs as his friend and to deflect her past failures and somehow linked them to Jobs' darker past. 

The thing is that Jobs learned from his past mistakes, spent years in the woods finding himself again, nearly lost much of his wealth with NEXT and Pixar before Disney inked a deal with Pixar and Apple bought NEXT.  And he applied his lessons to turn Apple around with a string of innovative products like the iPod, iMac, iPhone, and iPad.  And even the Macs are selling better with each passing quarter in the post-PC era. 

Sadly, even for those who agree with Fiorina's politics has to admit that there was no second coming of Carly where she took charge of a company and made it better than it was when she took over.  As mentioned in the article, HP's stock jumped on news of her dismissal. 

The Medium was no doubt negative on Fiorina.  While you can dismiss her closeness to Jobs and her time at HP as a failed executive, you cannot question her rise to the top of Hewlett-Packard, an iconic company in its own right. 

Carly is successful as a person and did what she needed for her career.  The question is whether her management style is a good fit for today's political evironment in DC.  And one thing to consider before closing:  as president, Carly will be unable to buy another country to shore up the country's revenues.  That's good, right?

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