Carly Fiorina at the KSG

I've attended two talks over the past two days at KSG.

Yesterday's talk was by Richard Holbrooke, former US Asst Secretary of State and Former US ambassador to the UN. He was talking on the topic, "Fighting the War on Terror: A Short-Term Vision for a Long-Term Conflict?". It was an interesting talk - he was attacking the semantics of "War on Terror" - terror is a tactic and not any individual, who exactly is the war on? Of course he is a Democrat. Lawrence Summers (Treasury Secretary under Clinton, also former President of Harvard) was in the audience and he exchanged pleasantries with Holbrooke. And whilst we are talking about Harvard big names, I suppose I should add that last Friday Amartya Sen was walking through the KSG Courtyard.

Anyway, let me get to the true subject of my post - the talk by Carly Fiorina, which was this evening. Now I must admit I had pretty high expectations. Carly has a reputation for being a good speaker. And she has just published her book and is promoting it (she was signing copies after the event at the COOP). So I expected a few excerpts (of the more exciting points).

So the session starts off with what was a pretty fawning introduction (Carly said thank you for a very "generous" introduction), and if that was not bad enough it was long-winded as well so we cringed through this lengthy speech.

Carly focused her own comments on leadership - business is about the people, so you have to address people issues in leadership and managing change - and uttered truisms about how people are people wherever they are. She alluded to her own departure from the Board but sort of slipped around what happened. Difficult for people who weren't following the fortunes of HP or didn't skim through her book prior to the talk (which I did) to work out what was going on. I can look at it charitably and say that she didn't want to bad-mouth people in public, but I can also say that she wanted to increase the incentive for people to buy the book! And although her book is titled "Tough Choices" she didn't actually tell us about any of these choices except that it was her decision to say openly, despite the bad press it would attract, that she was fired from HP rather than that she had decided to step down.

I suppose my takeaways are as follows:

• Change - it's a slow process, especially in large organisations. Individuals don't like change - it's great in theory, but should preferrably happen to someone else. So needs patience and discipline. Changing during bad times is even worse - more difficult for people to stay the course and easier for them to lose faith in the leader.
• Importance of processes to appraise and enhance the performance of Board members.

She spoke for only about 20 minutes and then there was some Q&A. The two hosts on stage monopolised the Q&A for about half an hour. Unfortunately the fawning host asked some fawning questions. Whilst the other gentleman asked better questions, I must say the student questions were excellent! One asked Carly to respond to unfavourable reviews of her book (in The Economist and Financial Times) which questioned her leadership but she chickened out! and said that everyone is entitled to their opinion. Another asked her to talk about what she felt her weakness was and how she addressed that. She said that her weakness was that she didn't know anything about technology and therefore it was important to have people around her who were good at technology, that it is about being aware of your weakness and having the humility to acknowledge and address it. Again, I see this as a cop-out because I thought that the question pertained to a personal weakness rather than a knowledge gap. (Oh, and she didn't answer the question on whether she intended to run for public office!).

I personally respect Carly and what she has achieved and I do think (from the little I know) that she was hard done by her Board. And maybe after having high expectations it would have been a let-down in any case. So it is a bit of a pity because I do think she had an opportunity to gain supporters (esp if she wanted to run for public office) this evening and it ended up being a bit of a "poor me" session.