First, we have to remember that women often get the top job when a company is in trouble. Note HP and GM in the US>
Megam McArdle writes: Justin Fox notes that HP was in a hard place, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld argues Fiorina seems indisposed to admit to and learn from her failures. Fiorina wasn’t the best CEO in history, she certainly wasn’t the worst, either.
Critiques of Fiorina’s tenure seem excessively focused on the outcome. People are far too prone to confuse outcomes with good decision-making. Too many of Fiorina’s critics pointed out that the company lost shareholder value, then settled back with a satisfied QED.
The merger Fiorina spearheaded with Compaq was costly and did not noticeably improve the company’s competitive position. The company stock price certainly did fall a lot from the time she started there to the time she finished (something that unsurprisingly happens to a lot of CEOs before they’re forced out). A lot of employees were laid off in the process of making a larger, less profitable company.
This does not mean that Fiorina did a bad job. Fox makes this point: The strategy she started paid off much better after she left, but she gets no credit for it. I’d like to make a different, if related point: Sometimes, CEOs don’t really have any good options.
At the time Fiorina took over, HP made a fine server and a nice workstation and a very good printer. But it had become clear that the hardware business wasn’t such a great place to be. In fact, that had been true for a while, but until the late 1990s, there was some hope that things would shake down to a few players, prices would stabilize, and things would get better, as had happened in the automobile market.
Did Fiorina manage to fix this problem? Not really. But it’s far from clear to me that anyone else could have fixed it, given that she presided over a difficult business model during the Great Tech Meltdown and the recession that followed. Her idea to merge with Compaq, in order to give the company enough scale to take on IBM in the corporate market, didn’t work out as she’d hoped, but while that’s obvious in hindsight, it was undoubtedly a mite harder to see at the time.
Failure doesn’t always mean that you made the wrong decision. It might just have meant that there were no good options, or that you got unlucky.
Fiorina could be the best CEO in the world, or the worst, and that wouldn’t give us much insight into how she’d do as president.
We’re in the midst of a great outsider boom, from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump, to populist parties in Europe and the election of a far-left Labour backbencher as leader of the party in the U.K. Much of the appeal seems to be that we need someone to shake things up who’s not beholden to the same tired, focus-grouped, compromised, corrupt political culture. On the left, this appetite seeks out radical firebrands who promise they won’t sell out to the neoliberal consensus; on the right, it looks to business leaders (or maybe surgeons), who have proved they are competent in a competitive domain utterly unlike the political system.
This is another way of committing the fundamental attribution error. Politicians are the way they are because they operate under serious constraints.
The closest job is either head of another government (most of whom are not legally eligible to run for U.S. president) or governor (few of whom have any foreign policy experience).
The problem, in other words, is not the people or the “culture” they live in; it is the system. And at least politicians know how to get results out of that system, however puny those results may seem next to our grand dreams of wholesale change. They do this largely by means of the very things we hate about them: staying within fairly narrowly plausible lines, compromising, trading favors, catering to single-issue interest groups, focus-grouping and poll-testing everything to death. An outsider may not do any of those things. But if not, they won’t do much else, either.
