Carly: From Secretary to CEO: “Sortof”
“It’s only in this country that you can go from being a secretary to the chief executive of the largest technology company in the world,” she told Jimmy Fallon, on “The Tonight Show,” last week. “Wow,” Fallon said. “It’s unbelievable.” It’s also, as with much that Fiorina says, a little more complicated than that. In 1976, Cara Carleton Sneed graduated from Stanford, where her father had been a law professor. (He later served in the Nixon Administration and on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.) She enrolled in law school at U.C.L.A. but dropped out. She worked briefly in a real-estate firm as a receptionist, then got married, moved to Italy for a while, and returned to attend business school in Maryland, after which, Stanford degree and M.B.A. in hand, she was hired as a management trainee at A. T. & T.
.. Some of the deals she closed were, in fact, unbelievable. In 1999, Lucent said that a little-known firm called PathNet would buy as much as two billion dollars’ worth of its equipment. As Fortunenoted later, PathNet’s annual revenues were only $1.6 million; Lucent would loan it money for the sale, which was unlikely to be repaid. But by the time such dubious accounting became public, leading to a collapse of Lucent’s stock, Fiorina, who was never accused of wrongdoing, had left for H.P., with a signing bonus worth sixty-eight million dollars and millions more in pay. When H.P. fired her, she got a twenty-million-dollar severance package, plus fifteen thousand dollars for career counselling. Only in this country, perhaps, could a C.E.O. receive compensation worth more than a hundred million dollars in six years, get fired, and use the money to enter politics.