Hewlett-Packard, struggling to find its way in the Internet age, also wants to “do even better.” That’s why it snared Fiorina last week to be its new chief executive. She was already one of the most powerful women in corporate America, president of the global services group at Lucent, the $30 billion telecom giant. But her appointment as head of mighty HP, the world’s second-largest computermaker and the 13th-biggest company in the country, puts her into a league of her own. No wonder her face was all over the business pages: the 44-year-old exec is the first woman to head a Fortune 100 company, and one of only three in the entire top 500. Many hailed the news as a victory for equal opportunity in the workplace; Fiorina herself shrugged off the gender question. Women, she told reporters bluntly, face “no limits whatsoever. There is not a glass ceiling.”
Right or not, Fiorina clearly has never been bounded by limits. The iconoclastic daughter of an abstract painter and a California judge, she graduated from Stanford with a degree in medieval history, dropped out of law school after concluding she was averse to precedents, then began working her way through the male-dominated ranks of AT&T. Along the way she went through one marriage, taught English in Italy, picked up business degrees from the University of Maryland and MIT and then married a fellow AT&Ter, with whom she has raised two stepdaughters and who happily stays home as a “house husband” and volunteer fireman. At Lucent, she was legendary for her crushing travel schedule, as well as her deft human touch–late-night phone calls to those burning the midnight oil, flowers and balloons for jobs well done. “She has a gift for taking account of people’s very diverse desires, goals and abilities,” says Dan Plunkett at Delta Consulting Group, who worked with her at Lucent. “In her mind, there is no space between defining a problem and solving it.”
For Hewlett-Packard, her arrival marks a watershed. Never before has it filled a top spot from outside. (The runner-up for the job, incidentally, was another woman at the company.) But transforming Hewlett-Packard from a slow-moving engineering company into a nimble Internet player will require more than aggressive marketing, Fiorina’s forte at Lucent. Getting new products to market quickly will take a wholesale change in culture. For Fiorina, that’s another mold to be broken.
