May 23 2007
iinnovate.com interview with Carly Fiorina
The team over at iinnovate.com always surprise me with the quality of their guests for their interviews. This latest interview with Carly Fiorina formerly CEO of HP is no exception. Min Li Chan and Min Liu ask some very good questions which dig out some great answers and advise from Carly.
Carly gives some really great perspectives in this interview. Here are a couple of my favorite questions:
When asked asked what element of being a CEO was most challenging at HP she Carly stated:
“The most challenging part about being CEO of HP was that we had to transform the company. It was a great company with a great history, but it was also a company that was lagging further and further behind when I arrived. ….. <stats on missed financials, lack of innovation , etc>… We had a great deal of change that needed to be done, and change is always very difficult. It [change] is always resisted and particularly difficult with a large, tradition-bound company like HP was. But that is also frankly the challenge and joy of leadership. Leadership is always about changing things. ….”
When asked how to preserve innovation and a sense of entrepreneurship in corporate America as companies grow above 10,000 employees mark she stated:
“… So it is a challenge for every company. The pressure for Corporate America boils down to the fact that the focus on profitability sometimes causes people to cut costs as opposed to investing in innovation. This is where leadership is so imporatant. If the leadership doesn’t decide that innovation is a value worth celebrating then eventually it will whither. If leadership doesn’t decide that instead of cutting that expense, they will make that investment in the future, then the investments won’t get made….. I think it is about the culture of a place. Whether risk-taking is really celebrated and rewarded, and if you are going to celebrate and reward risk taking, you have to let people make mistakes. Not every bet is goign to pay off and you have to deal with that…. There is no silver bullet, but it starts with a believe that innovation is the life-blood of a technology company….”
When asked about the trend of startup aquiring as the major source of innovation for a tech company and whether this was dangerous she replied.
“I think it is a trend which offers some advantaeges to startups…. It is dangerous when taken to extreme…. Every company gets to a place where the old answers don’t work anymore and then the only thing that works is for people to be creative and try new approaches to old problems. If you have outsources all your creativity, all your ability to take risk, all your ability to think about a new idea, then you are not going to be able to solve the problem you need to solve….”
Her talk on how medieval studies (college major) helped her and what a CEO is suppose to do she stated:
“That set of studies, more than anything, taught me how to think…. It [particular class in her major where she was required to read thousands of pages and condense them to 2 pages every week] taught me that to really undestand something you really have to go through all the detail of it, but then to be able to communicate something, to be able to prioritize action around something, you have to get it down to the essence. It taught me how you distringuish between the truly important and the merely interesting….”
When asked why she thought that anyone wanting to be a CEO should take on a sales role as some point in their career she stated:
” I think the human dimension of business is really important…. but beyond that, what selling is really about, if it is done well, is talking to people in a language they understand, that is meaningful to them. If you are going to be successful in selling something to someone else, you have to speak to them in language that is familiar to them and in terms of things that are important to them….. Those are skills that any executive needs to have: How do communicate effectively. How do speak to people in language they understand. How tp speak to them in terms that are important to them….”
Interesting insights on some relevent topics to anyone in business. There is much, much more in the interview, well worth the listen.
