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SPEED REVIEW

2007, August 24, Friday

Tough Choices (1/2)
Business is about people

After she appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine as "The Most Powerful Woman in Business," Carly Fiorina's mother told her, "Who knows? Maybe someday you'll become the CEO of Hewlett-Packard." Her mother's comment surprised Fiorina, considering the mother and daughter had never spoken of  the company. Fiorina's response was: "Well, that's never going to happen!"

Following that conversation, she received a phone call from HP board member Jeff Christian in February 1999; nonetheless, Fiorina was almost certain the HP board would not offer her the available CEO position for a number of reasons: She had never held the position before, she did not have a background in engineering, she wasn't from the industry, and she was a woman. On July 19, 1999, Fiorina was proved wrong as HP publicly announced her succession of Lewis Platt as CEO.

  Law School Dropout to CEO

After earning her B.A in medieval history and philosophy from StanfordUniversity, Fiorina completed a short stint at UCLALawSchool, dropping out after she realized that law wasn't the career for her and that she couldn't always please her parents with her choices.

Fiorina joined the business world, spending her first 20 years cutting her teeth and climbing the corporate ladder at AT&T and Lucent Technologies before accepting the challenge to lead, as CEO and eventually as chairman, the technology giant Hewlett-Packard. To many people she seemed an unlikely candidate, but Fiorina managed to lead HP through a number of large internal changes, a significant technology slump , and the Compaq merger, which is considered one of the most controversial mergers in the industry.

Vocabulary Focus

stint (n) ---a period of time spent doing a particular activity

cut your teeth (idiom) ---to get your first experience of a particular type of work and learn the basic skills

climb the corporate ladder (idiom) ---to more into increasingly better position in a company