Good morning, Gina. :2wave:
I was remembering what the buzz was at the company I worked for at the time it was happening, and how the women were so angry at the way she was being treated. HP hired her to do the job of reversing their slow slide into insolvency, since she had done so well at Lucent. Yes, she changed the culture at HP, but that's what she was hired to do.
She was at HP for six years, and acquiring Compac in her third year as CEO was a very big deal, which some of the older Board members weren't happy with. Turned out that it changed HP for the better, but it was a calculated move on her part at the time, since acquisitions and mergers aren't always successful, as you know. Today it is being called the "merger that worked" by financial experts on Wall Street. It is true that streamlining the company resulted in layoffs, but that's not unusual.
When I referred to "saving jobs" in my post, what I meant was keeping the company from bankruptcy, where everyone loses. We saw that happen recently when Hostess Brands, which makes Wonder Bread and twinkies, among other things, was forced to file bankruptcy because the bakers wouldn't agree with the other workers at Hostess to changes the company needed to save itself, and everyone lost their job as a result. It may have been a bluff on the part of the bakers, but that calculated risk didn't work out, so it was a hollow victory that made them very unpopular with the other workers, who now didn't have a job either. Such is life.
Re outsourcing to other countries, we heard at the time that she was fighting that, but I don't know the outcome, since I no longer own HP stock in my IRA, and haven't kept up on what they're doing. It's interesting to me to read the pros and cons today about something that happened 10 years ago, but the letter recently sent from HP basically said she did a good job as CEO. That could have been a wise PR move from Meg Whitman, the current CEO, though, since no company ever wants bad publicity - it affects share price! :mrgreen:
