Link: http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/187962046_1.html

With Carly Fiorina re-appearing recently as a public figure to try and gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in California (after a lengthy period out of the public eye battling cancer), I found this interesting article about her tenure at HP, which ended with her dismissal in 2005.
As is often the case, the demonization of Fiorina after she left HP tended to focus on and personalize her own perceived failings, and overlook the contribution of other actors in the debacle. As this article makes clear, there was plenty of blame to go around, starting with the HP board of directors, who, worried about the decline in the HP stock price, felt that they needed an outsider to "save" the corporation. Once they had hired Fiorina, they failed to exert proper stewardship and ignored numerous warning signs up till and after her dismissal. As a result, HP came under scrutiny for ethics violations even after Fiorina left, and Carly Fiorina's successor as CEO, Mark Hurd, had to apologize to the outside world for the ethical lapses.
The situation that unfolded at HP was very similar to what occurred inside EDS during the period of time when Dick Brown was the CEO. Like Fiorina, Dick Brown was a sales-driven deal-maker with little interest in operational processes. As a result, he focussed on splashy sales deals (which drove the stock price up) and then ignored execution issues (which in turn drove the stock down and eroded his credibility to the point where he was forced to resign in 2003). Once again, he was enabled in this by a weak and largely compliant board, his own position as CEO and Chairman, which is still one of the colossal conflicts of interest for a corporation, and his own employment contract, which rewarded him handsomely for inflating the EDS stock price. Dick was merely doing what his contract incented him to to, which in the short term made the marketplace happy, but it stored up medium-term trouble as solutions were oversold and execution was neglected.
Both Carly Fiorina and Dick Brown were examples of what the article terms "rock star" CEOs; sales-focussed ethically neutral leaders who came to be seen by their employees as self-centered, uncaring and inauthentic. Sadly, the pendulum in large corporations has not yet swung all the way back from those excesses.