Ms Carleton "Carly" Fiorina who was named on Monday as the new chief executive of Silicon Valley pioneer and corporate icon Hewlett-Packard has risen through the ranks of Lucent Technologies to earn the reputation as a fearless, high-energy corporate leader.
The move by the number two computer company makes Ms Fiorina the first woman leader of a US blue-chip company and a "standout" in the high technology sector, an industry dominated by men. She replaces outgoing chief executive Mr Lew Platt, who oversaw the company as it nearly tripled in sales from 1992 by pushing first into high-end computer servers and then into Internet software. For Ms Fiorina (44), who was named the US's most powerful businesswoman by Fortune magazine last autumn, gender "is not the subject of the story". She and others said it makes sense that HP would be the company to elevate the most powerful woman in US business to an even greater height.
"It's certainly consistent with HP's very long and distinguished track record of focusing on talent and merit," said Ms Fiorina, a University of California, Los Angeles, law school drop-out whose first paying job was as an HP shipping clerk.
Ms Fiorina, who received degrees from Stanford University, the University of Maryland and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joins an elite group of women heading Fortune 500 companies: Ms Jill Barad of Mattel and Ms Marion Sandler of Golden West Financial.
"She is extremely well-respected internally at Lucent," said analyst Mr Greg Geiling of J.P. Morgan, one of the underwriters that sold a record $3 billion (€2.94 billion) worth of Lucent shares to the public in 1996. After leading the IPO, Ms Fiorina seized the Internet moment at Lucent by pushing its largest unit from a focus on voice-related products to data.
Ms Fiorina is widely seen as a good bet to push the slow-moving HP ahead in the fast-moving Internet-centric economy.
While its printer business and some smaller divisions dominate its markets, HP badly missed out on the development of the Net. Earlier this year, Mr Platt admitted the mistake and announced his impending retirement and the planned separation of the company's testing and measurement unit. Mr Platt will stay on as chairman through the end of the year, when he will be succeeded by retired HP executive Mr Richard Hackborn.
After receiving her MBA from MIT, Ms Fiorina joined AT&T as a sales rep and made a series of gutsy career choices including abandoning an easy job marketing toll-free services for the unglamorous equipment arm that later became Lucent.
