Former HP Honcho jogging towards White House next?

INDIA: It will take a while to let the news sink in before the barbs come out. After all it’s Carly Fiorina we are talking about. And when you hear that this ex-chief executive of Hewlett-Packard has turned into the first woman to seek GOP’s (Grand Old Party) nod for White House in the 2016 race and is being pitted against Hillary Clinton already, you know there are so many people who are just itching to open the potshot-can.

Yes, Fiorina has formally declared herself a candidate for president and is the first woman to seek the Republican nomination in 2016. As her message on Twitter wraps it well–“I am running for president.”

But it can’t be that simple if it’s Fiorina we are talking about, can it?

After all, she has been at the receiving end of endless criticisms and suggestions after the HP episode.

From being unable to build trust between herself and the company, a blatant disregard for her employees’ reactions, the ill-timed $19 billion Compaq acquisition and associated ‘lay-off’ massacre, wasting efforts into engineering the company’s relevance in a decrepit PC market, poor execution of her own vision on company’s new tagline ‘invent’, to stripping apart company’s cultural DNA with an unpalatable top-down approach, post-merger massive HR chops and many other strategic boo-boos; critics have had a Martini time ripping apart her capabilities and CEO-prowess.

They continue to do so and fodder diet like her erratic voting record or her skipping most elections since moving to California in 2000, only make the soup thicker even till date.

But Fiorina for some inexplicable reason and with a tough-hide has always maintained her sharp rebuttals. Like when you get to read this on her website biography - “The HP Way was being used as a shield against change.”

In fact, she had the guts and the digestive juices to handle every brick that came along with tough decisions like going headlong against Dell in the low-cost PC market and vying hard with IBM in the consulting and services sectors, all this while trying to soup up HP into a celebrity image with Gwen Stefani. Of course, who can forget the ill-famed and the biggest merger in IT history during her time!

She still holds that she only did the right thing for the company in terms of its long-anchored future and post-Fiorina computer sales figures might even rhyme with her arguments.

Carly Fiorina’s track record and list of brickbats notwithstanding, she is incidentally also avowed by some industry watchers as a bold CEO, way ahead of her time. Post Lucent Technologies, she came into HP’s radar in 1999 when the board began looking for someone who could address a stodgy, bureaucratic, demoralized conglomerate that was facing adversaries from all sides - Dell in PCs, Lexmark in printers, Sun Microsystems in servers, and IBM on other fronts.

After moving on from the nameplate of president of Lucent’s Global Service Provider Business, she created ripples with her vision for HP and hogged stages, media-attention as well high-profile tables like the World Economic Forum and was a public face for HP in no time.

Her dynamism, charisma, CEO-mojo and ability to spark debates made her a media favourite of sorts. But then the ‘huge’ Compaq acquisition happened and soon to follow were thorny decisions like laying off thousands of people in one stroke or bundling together hundreds of product groups or to trim other redundancies. Word goes around that she even went as far as overriding a boardroom minority when it objected to the merger and was somewhere in the picture (starting investigation of boardroom leaks) of the other well-known spy scandal.

Interestingly enough, at one point she remarked how her situation may have been due to her gender. "I think men understand other men’s needs for respect differently than how they understand it for a woman” she was quoted pointing it out. In fact in a 2013 article, ‘To Change the World, Invest in One Woman’, Carly Fiorina reminisced that in 2008, while working as an adviser to the State Department, she entered into a public-private partnership with USAID and helped found the One Woman Initiative and how Condoleezza Rice, then the secretary of state, worked along to support grassroots organizations that focused on women’s need for leadership training, job opportunities, and justice.

She stressed there that – ‘Those three strong, successful women are a reminder that even with government, business, and philanthropy all contributing, progress often boils down to the initiative of one woman.’

“When men cut jobs, they're seen as decisive. When women do, they're vindictive.” Another of her quote reads.

Years rolled on and some critics had to chew their words admitting that possibly the Compaq acquisition did make sense and HP has moved on to a new set of strengths and challenges now.

Fiorina’s strategy may have provided more long-term benefit than people anticipated. HP eventually did see some good quarters after merging with Compaq.)

The woman who spent almost two decades at AT&T and Lucent Technologies and a very media-spotlight-dotted and controversy-packed window at HP, was also named the “most powerful woman in American business” by Fortune Magazine at one point.

The break-up phase was soon over and she moved on to an equally-high-decibel autobiography; a memoir on her business career called ‘Tough Choices’, has associated with a commentary spot for Fox Business Network; served on the MIT board of trustees, the World Economic Forum’s Foundation Board, and also on other notable boards of companies like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company or that of Cisco’s board of directors and eventually inked a book 'Rising to the Challenge' (which travels through her personal life, the death of her daughter, her fight against cancer, her adherence to Christianity).

As she self-confessedly tags herself (on her website)- the first CEO not promoted from within; a woman leader in a male-dominated culture; a marketing expert in a company that worshipped engineers; an easterner surrounded by Silicon Valley lifers; Fiorina sounds like someone who will not get jittery stepping into boots of a different leather.

Her political encounters started visibly in 2008, when she started backing the campaign for John McCain (which of course later took a different turn when Sarah Palin came into the plot). After donning the role of an economic adviser to nominee John McCain, in 2009, Fiorina, registered a campaign committee named ‘Carly for California, and worked towards raising money for a 2010 Senate run,

She told how she is getting encouraged to run by people across the political spectrum, pursued policy advisers and financial donors and floated again in news for ads like “demon sheep.”

Now she is back - confidently touting her private sector experience as the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company, and iterating: “Only in the United States of America can a young woman start as a secretary and work to become chief executive of one of the largest technology companies in the world.”

As her pitch reads: “If you’re tired of the sound bites, the vitriol, the pettiness, the egos, the corruption, if you believe that it’s time to declare the end of identity politics, if you believe that it’s time to declare the end of lowered expectations, if you believe that it’s time for citizens to stand up to the political class and say: ‘Enough’, then join us.”

Will her supposed Anti-Clinton warfare be enough for clinching a good spot at or around the world’s most coveted job? Or does she pack more arrows in her kit than what we can see? Either ways, we will get to know how the next chapter of her life unfolds very soon.

If anything, it’s going to be worth all the eyeballs and eardrums if Fiorina’s penchant for headlines has stayed unruffled.

After all she herself says - Once I dive in, I dive in all the way!