After the "kid's table" Republican debate, candidate and corporate job-killer Carly "Snarly" Fiorina saw a bump up in her poll numbers. Her campaign strategy is to present herself as a successful business executive who has the skills to run the Government. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO is notorious for touting her failed tenure at HP as a success story, twisting and misrepresenting data to put her in the best possible light. But as the New York Times reports, it was disastrous for the company and 30,000 employees that were let go, and the "success" she is touting wasn't a success at all:
"Hewlett-Packard is still recovering from the ill-conceived merger [with Compaq] nearly 15 years later, and recently decided to split the company up. There were some 30,000 layoffs. Its stock price plunged and badly lagged its competition...
'When you manage in tough times, when you lead in tough times, sometimes tough calls are necessary, and yet we took that company from about $44 billion to almost $90 billion,' Mrs. Fiorina said to The Des Moines Register editorial board. 'We took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent'...Here’s the problem: Those numbers she is referencing aren’t Hewlett-Packard’s profit. They are the company’s revenue. And if you make enough acquisitions — especially one the size of Compaq — you can inflate your revenue figures. You can also buy growth." (emphasis added)It's not just the verdict of many observers in the business world that Snarly's tenure at HP was an unmitigated disaster brought on by her bad judgement, listen to Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP's founder, in a 2010 open letter rebutting accolades by several Republican officials:
"I know a little bit about Carly Fiorina, having watched her almost destroy the company my grandfather founded. So, allow me to disillusion you of a few of your stated reasons for supporting her….Most business commentators consider Fiorina's tenure at HP to be a disaster. The stock price dropped by 50% only to rally 10% on the announcement of her firing. She fired 28,000 people before she herself was fired, departing with the 21 million dollar golden parachute that is financing her campaign.” (emphasis added)Of course with a low-information Rethuglican base ignoring Rump Trump's past and even current embrace of positions that are anathema to them, Snarly could go a long way with this crowd in convincing them that she's another Bill Gates.
