MAKEOVER ARTIST COMPANY Hewlett-Packard Co., President and CEO NET WORTH $2.2 billion AGE 45 ADDRESSwww.hp.com BIO Chosen in July to lead the world's second biggest computer company (behind IBM),
Carly Fiorina has the job of recasting Hewlett-Packard's image from that of a
stodgy company best known for its printers to a compelling Internet player.
Fiorina is not only the first outsider to hold a top position at the 60-year-old
Silicon Valley institution but she's also the first woman to head a Dow 30
company. At the top of her agenda, Fiorina says, is pushing
"e-services"--technologies that help companies with e-commerce. But the real
challenge is to refocus HP's image, something for which Fiorina's background at
Lucent Technologies prepared her well. She directed its spin-off from AT&T in
1996, back when Lucent was considered a ho-hum phone-equipment company. After she
got through with it--leading a marketing campaign and an IPO--Lucent had been
reborn as a sexy telecom company for the new economy.
Her undergraduate training might have been the perfect foundation for what she
was to become. Fiorina was a medieval-history and philosophy major at Stanford
University. She had planned to be a lawyer like her law-professor dad. But
deciding it wasn't the right fit, she dropped out of law school after a semester
and joined AT&T as a sales rep, figuring it was a short-term gig. Almost 20 years
later, she left Lucent as one of the most powerful female executives in the U.S.
BEST LINE "My gender is interesting but really not the subject of the story
here."
FORWARD TILT Deals with Yahoo and Oracle signal that Fiorina is serious about
making HP a true Internet company. Also check out that print campaign ("Go
seamlessly into the future").
