HP Replenishes Gyno Poly Pipeline

I noted in the news today that Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman has announced her 2018 retirement from the company under a pall of speculation that she is eyeing the office of the President as her next strategic acquisition.

Ms. Whitman, a California billionesse, made her fortune chaperoning Ebay’s early expansion—most notably its lucrative IPO in September 1998. Following almost a decade taking commissions on sales of used shoes, she commenced the first of her failed political forays. In 2010 she ran for Governor of California as a Republican, spending $144 million of her own dough in the process. Unfortunately she forgot she was a white Republican running for office in a state that has become a taco stand, and so was throttled by Jerry Brown who began his political career during the California gold rush. You would have thought CEOs better understood their market.

Of course Ms. Whitman is a very intelligent woman, and thus impervious to plain lessons of cause and effect. All those Mexicans simply needed to hear a more nuanced appeal before once again ignoring republicans completely. So she proceeded to hone her political craft on the 2008 McCain train before that derailed into support for the Romney zombie.

In the 2016 cycle, Whitman initially supported Chris Christie. Upon his defenestration, she an outspoken Never Trump neocon for the remainder of the campaign. In fact, her impassioned conservative principles succumbed so thoroughly to pique that she openly endorsed Clinton, citing Trump’s Hitlerness and the belief that he had “exploited anger, grievance, xenophobia and racial division.” It’s a good thing liberals never exploit racial division or she’d simply have to leave politics as a matter of conscience.

Though fortunately Ms. Whitman suffers no burden of that attribute, and so discussion swirls about her designs on 2020. The comical aspect of that discussion being its focus on which party she’d even seek to represent. As every executive knows, it’s very important to align one’s heartfelt convictions with the current political topography. They teach you that at Harvard Business School.

But between her political sorties, Meg finds occasional moments to run large multinational corporations. From 2011 to the present she piloted Hewlett-Packard (which broke into two companies in 2015). Her stewardship of one of these (HPE) since the decoupling has been largely market-tracking as far as share price is concerned, and thus no debacle from an investor standpoint. Though her thousands and thousands of former employees might offer contrasting opinions.

But what I find so interesting about the HP gyno poly-pipeline is how surprisingly well populated it is.

I presume most people have forgotten Carly Fiorina. I, for one, will forgive you. For those who do not recall, she also helmed Hewlett-Packard, this time from 1999 to 2005. Ms. Fiorina was the first female CEO of a company ranked in the Fortune top twenty, a distinction she arrived at by virtue of having no prior chief executive experience whatsoever. That’s how bad it was for women at the time.

The primary accomplishment of her tenure was the acquisition of competing computer manufacturer Compaq. This was a widely-derided transaction that ultimately produced a $1.2 billion write-off some ten years later—which is only $120 million/year if you amortize like a professional. Here is a possibly related graph of HP’s stock price during Fiorina’s leadership.

In any event, the HP board eventually showed her the door, which opened the same door as the one Meg Whitman was pushing on: politics. Like Whitman, Fiorina worked on the 2008 “Bomb Everyone” McCain campaign. And like Whitman again, she pivoted from that political failure to one of her own in California. In 2010, while Meg was losing to Moonbeam, Carly was getting trounced by one of California’s two ancient hebrew senators. Avishag and Shulammit were their names, I think. Anyway, Fiorina lost to one of them for precisely the same reason as Whitman. Which meant she was going to have to start her political career over at bottom: by running for President.

So she did, and even got a VP slot out of the deal. How many remember Fiorina’s six-day sojourn as Ted Cruz’s somewhat prematurely announced general election running mate? Like Ted, I went on and announced my own vice president selection late last summer to equal public interest.

But here’s what’s even more interesting. In 2016, Ms. Whitman expressed a dim view of her CEO sista’s aspirations, allegedly saying that Fiorina was not qualified to be President and that it is “very difficult for your first role in politics to be President of the United States.” Cat scratch fever! I wonder if a still-bristling Carly will go on the 2020 chat circuit to repeat that quote frequently should Ms. Whitman determine it doesn’t apply to her.

Either way, I really don’t think it will matter. If Whitman follows Fiorina’s presidential path, she will follow it precisely. Not because she is a woman, but because she is a bloodless technocrat with no natural constituency. Another of this genus, Mitt Romney, previously made a valiant effort to cobble a coalition out of people he obviously didn’t give the slightest shit about. It didn’t win then, and it won’t in the future.

People like Meg Whitman helped create a society that will never again elect people like Meg Whitman. By treating their nation like a flea market they have cultivated political consumers who are only interested in bargains for themselves. Family members worry about the health of the family. Shoppers never worry about the health of a business. They worry about what they can extract from it. So voters in petri-dish countries tacitly say who cares if you’re a competent businesswoman—what are you going to give me and mine? Whitman’s stories of EBay success will not satisfactorily answer that question. Being good says nothing about whether you’re good for us.

That is the silicon technocrat’s dilemma, no matter their genitalia. They purchase open borders for frictionless and efficient commerce, and then are flummoxed on election days to learn this produces a society of friction and inefficiency.

So even if ladies like Meg and Carly never get to be President, at least they got inconceivably rich ruining the country…which is nice.

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