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Executive Times |
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2006 Book Reviews |
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Tough Choices
by Carly Fiorina |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Clichés There’s one
key piece of advice for readers of Carly Fiorina’s memoir Tough
Choices: whenever your career offers you an easy path or a tough one,
choose the tough one. At several career junctures, that’s what Fiorina did, and as a result she was prepared to take on the
CEO job at Hewlett-Packard. Much of the attention to Fiorina
came from her tumultuous ride as H-P CEO, and in Tough
Choices, readers get a chance to hear her side of that story. Had that
been the bulk of this book, it would have been a big yawn. Instead, we hear
her tell the story of her formative years, and her complete work career, and
most readers will come away with a more complete image of Fiorina,
and one that comes across better in print than when she’s presented in visual
media. Here’s an excerpt, all of Chapter 11, “The Journey, Not the
Destination,” pp. 80-85: When Lou Golm had taken over FTS2000, he’d decided to let me do my
job and not try to do it for me. He had lots of work to do that he didn’t
need me for, but where he did, he’d relied on me. He treated his other subordinates
in the same way. Because of his decision not to micromanage, to do his job
while we did ours, we were all more effective. More than that, Lou’s
confidence in me earned him my gratitude, my loyalty and my best work. In January
of 1988, Lou began to talk to me about the Sloan School of Management at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The school offered a one-year
intensive program of study that culminated in a master of science in business
administration. Companies sent midcareer managers
to the program for development purposes. AT&T sent two or three people a
year, and many candidates vied for those slots. Many of Jim Olson’s Office of
the Chairman executives had attended Sloan. Lou himself had gone, and now he
and Mike Brunner wanted to sponsor me to attend. This was a program for
people who were being groomed for senior management roles. It was the
first time I thought I might make it to vice president at AT&T. When I
joined the company in 1980, I’d figured I’d stick around for a year or two.
Maybe I wouldn’t like it, maybe they wouldn’t like me, and maybe I wasn’t
really cut out for a big company or a career in business. AT&T had an
employee savings plan in which the company matched the employee’s contributions;
however, if you left, you couldn’t receive the company’s portion of your
savings until you’d been at AT&T for at least five years. I declined to
join the plan because I knew I wouldnt last that
long. On my five-year service anniversary, Frank and I had just been married
and I’d been promoted. It seemed there was quite enough to celebrate, and I
wasn’t thinking about what came next. In fact, for the entirety of my now
eight-year career, I’d poured all my energies into the job I had and didn’t
think about the career ladder that might be in front of me. Now Lou was
telling me it was time to think about it. More than that, he was telling me I
had the potential to climb several rungs. Of course
I said I was interested, but the whole conversation had a surreal quality to
it. Frank and I were visiting Carole Spurner and
her husband, Greg, in Key West, Florida, the day I got the phone call from
Lou telling me I’d been selected to attend Sloan. When I hung up the phone, I
just kept saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.” It seemed as
though my life were happening to someone else. Sloan
turned out to be both a great sacrifice and a great gift. It was a sacrifice
because Frank had a very important job of his own, and lie couldn’t just
suddenly move to MIT is
full of rocket scientists—literally. Everywhere you go you run into
geniuses—Nobel Prize winners, those who will he Nobel Prize winners, students
and teachers of incredible mental strength. It isn’t just how smart everyone
is that charges the atmosphere, however. It is also a school where discipline
and hard work are mandatory. At Stanford people are plenty smart, but when I
was there, the atmosphere was quite relaxed. I, and many others, worked
extremely hard, but you didn’t have to. At MIT everyone did—and you had to.
The curriculum in every department, including the The required
courses for the MS degree included economics, finance, accounting, operations
research and organizational behavior. I had studied many of these subjects
before, but they had a different impact now that I’d been in the workforce
for a while. Certain insights stand out for me still. I remember studying
game theory in Jake Jacoby’s Applied Economics course. Economic theory posits
that people will always behave rationally based upon their own self-interest.
Markets, in economic terms, are collections of people behaving rationally.
Game theory is a quantitative discipline that attempts to predict and
explain nonrational decision making. In essence, so
the theory goes, people can behave irrationally simply because they believe
someone else is going to. Fear and
uncertainty can drive behavior. Emotion can determine a decision as often as
reason. Large groups, or responsible executives, or individuals can he
motivated to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot through their actions.
These are commonsense statements to anyone who has actually observed people
in the real business world. Apparently, the frequency and consequence of nonrational decision making in the marketplace spawned an
entire field of study devoted to explaining it. I remember
Gahe Bitran’s course,
Management Decision Support Models, which gave me great insight into the
requirement for holistic systems thinking. If only one part or parameter of a
complex systems problem is understood or acted upon, the problem cannot he
solved. Only by comprehending the whole system—its interactions,
dependencies, constraints and pressures—can a real, sustainable improvement
be made. Many systems and problems are simply too complex to be approached
adequately through a change in organizational structure or the application of
subject-matter expertise. You’ve heard the old saying To any complex problem,
the simple, obvious answer is wrong. This course proved the point. In
Organizational Psychology, taught by Ed Schein and
John Van Maanen, we conducted elaborate
negotiating sessions through role-playing. This time the role-playing didn’t
scare me, but observing the behavior in those sessions was sobering. Everyone
would go into them knowing that solutions could only be found by creating
win-win scenarios; both parties had to feel their most pressing issues had
been addressed. It was startling to see how quickly people could dissolve
into I-win-you-lose behavior, even when they knew rationally that it wouldn’t
work. Once this pattern was established, and emotion and ego took over, it
was very hard to recover and find a solution. I remember
reading a book by Alfred D. Chandler in our strategy course. He wrote,
“Strategy should be ennobling.” This made sense to me; an organization’s
effort must be sustained through worthy purpose. Fear, the so-called “burning
platform,” is a temporary motivator. We all read a case study on a CEO’s
undertaking major change at a company Everyone in the class criticized the
CEO for moving too slowly; he’d failed to generate enough momentum to sustain
his change efforts. After a while I raised my hand and said, ‘We all could
have made the same mistake. If he’d moved any quicker, he would have been
criticized for being too radical.” I would later be called a radical myself. I can’t
say I loved writing a thesis, hut when it was over, I felt a real sense of
accomplishment. Now I’m grateful that I recognize the twin poles of
panic—I’ll never start….I’ll never finish—that a writer swings between. I took
electives in manufacturing management. I’d never been exposed to
manufacturing before; the disciplines and challenges were fascinating and
complex. When I left Sloan, I returned to the manufacturing arm of AT&T.
I studied international dimensions of business management. One can tell a lot
about the times in 1989: we still talked about “international” instead of
“global.” Without this course I don’t think I would have had the confidence
to make the choices I did when I left Sloan. I took a
fascinating course by Michael Lee: Business Implications of Advanced
Technology I wrote a research paper on neural networks, and beyond the
intricacies of the science itself, I began to see the connections between
not only biology and technology but also between biology and organizational
structure and behavior. These insights would help shape the Leadership
Framework I would later introduce at Hewlett-Packard. All of
these courses shaped my business thinking. The course that caused me to do
the most personal soul-searching, however, was Ever since
reading Antigone, I have taken the time, once a year,
to deeply examine my own behavior and motivation. It’s sort of a
year-in-review exercise that happens around New Year’s. Each year, alone and
in private, I ask myself whether I am at peace with the choices I’ve made. Is
my soul still my own? I met one
of my dearest friends at MIT. Deborah Bowker was
one of the few other women in our class (there were nine of us out of a class
of fifty). Like me, she lived in downtown I observed
a lot of CEOs that year. They would come to campus every few weeks and spend
an evening with our class. Each would lecture for an hour or so, and then
we’d have dinner together. Perhaps by then it shouldn’t have been a surprise,
but it was: CEOs were people too. Just like people everywhere, in every walk
of life, some were good at their jobs; some weren’t. Some were
straightforward; others dissembled. Some got to the top after a lifetime of preparation;
others still seemed surprised they were there. Some practiced intimidation;
some were engaging. Some you could see yourself having a drink with; some you
hoped you’d never see again. Some impressed me; others depressed me. Mostly
the interactions took the mystery out of the CEO. And so for the very first
time, I told my father when he came to visit that perhaps one day I, too,
might become a CEO, just as Frank had predicted so many years ago. Interacting
with the other Sloan Fellows was a year’s worth of learning all by itself. I
developed new skills in collaboration because most assignments could not be
completed alone. I gained new insight into other cultures because my
classmates came from all over the world. We formed friendships that have endured.
We studied hard and laughed a lot. Some of us discovered a great Irish pub
near Harvard called the Plough and Stars. It became the setting for one of
our favorite games: “If you could spend an evening with anyone in the world,
living or dead, who would it he and why?’ The Plough
and Stars was also the scene of an important revelation that came on our very
last day, after graduation exercises. The people who made it to the Sloan
program were very driven, type A overachievers who
were focused on goals and accomplishments. We had just completed a year that
was a great luxury—a sudden intermission in our lives when we could change
the pace, tempo and nature of how we spent our days. That night we all
wondered aloud whether we had savored the year sufficiently. Had we been too
focused on getting that A and not fully absorbing
the learning that went on in the process? Had we been so worried about the
job we might go back to that we’d failed to appreciate our time without one?
Goals are important, but that night I realized that life is about the
journey not the destination. The steps along the way are what make us who we
are. The clichés, as in this excerpt, were
often distracting, but readers expect this kind of language from any writer
who has spent much time in corporate meetings. Tough
Choices has some career lessons for readers, and presents a life and a
voice that at the least, entertains. Steve Hopkins,
November 20, 2006 |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December
2006 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Tough
Choices.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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