Hewlett-Packard's new CEO, Carly Fiorina, '76, has her work cut out for her. As the first woman to head a Dow 30 company, the former medieval history major and UCLA Law School dropout hopes to revamp her company's stodgy image while strengthening its Internet services and jazzing up marketing efforts. It's too early to know whether the former star executive of Lucent Technologies will succeed, but she had one thing going for her from the moment she accepted the job last summer -- great press. A sampling:
Business Week: "Carly Fiorina has a silver tongue and an iron will."
Financial Times: "Affable and strikingly confident, she is a natural leader."
Forbes: "This may be the boldest move for HP since William Hewlett and David Packard started the company in a Palo Alto garage 60 years ago."
Fortune: "Her ascent continues."
New York Times: "What no one questioned today were Ms. Fiorina's leadership skills."
Wall Street Journal: "On a trip to China . . . [she] had to match her hosts drink for drink, and she managed to outlast them all."
Los Angeles Times: "Fiorina is widely seen as a good bet to push slow-moving HP ahead in the fast-moving Internet-centric economy."
Newsweek: "At Lucent, she was legendary for her crushing travel schedule, as well as her deft human touch."
San Francisco Chronicle: "In the 1970s she held a lowly part-time gig with a local technology firm. It was in the shipping department of HP."
Read a January 2010 update on this story.
