Carly Fiorina
Carly Fiorina reflects on her journey as a business leader, highlighting the importance of humility and humanity. She is the former CEO of Hewlett Packard and the National Honorary Chair of the Virginia 250 Commission. Find her at: www.carlyfiorina.com
Transcripción
Carly Fiorina:
You cannot be a good citizen, you cannot help form a more perfect union if what you're absolutely paralyzed by is what everybody else thinks about me, some identity that's smaller than America but more important to you, and oh my gosh, what will people say about me?
Ted Roosevelt:
Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. For today's show, I had the privilege of speaking with Carly Fiorina. She's a groundbreaking businesswoman, having been the first female CEO of a Fortune 50 company. Today, she's helping lead the Virginia 250 Commission, an organization working to celebrate our nation's founding. We talk about lessons learned as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, and we also delve into American history and how it can help heal the nation's political divide. Carly's wisdom and expertise make this a conversation you don't want to miss. Thank you for joining us.
Carly, I'm thrilled to have you on this podcast. Thank you for joining us.
Carly Fiorina:
Well, thank you for having me. I'm very thrilled to be with you as well.
Ted Roosevelt:
Oh, that's wonderful. One of the reasons I'm so excited to have you on is because you're a dual threat for us. You're an expert in American history and you're an expert in leadership, and I want to talk about both those things. But before we even get into that, I want to start at the starting point for you, the start of your career. You were the CEO of Hewlett-Packard, you were the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 company. You've written three bestselling books, you ran for President of the United States, but you got your start as a secretary in a real estate firm after studying medieval history and philosophy in college. So tell me a little bit about that path from where you started to where you ended up.
Carly Fiorina:
Okay. Well first, let me say I was very blessed by parents who valued education greatly, but in particular, who valued a liberal arts education. They felt that a well-rounded person, a well-rounded citizen, which they both were, should understand history and philosophy and those things. And way back then, it was very clear in the study of history that it is never just in the past, that it impacts the present, that it can help move the future, and I also learned through the study of philosophy that ideas can change the world.
However, I wasn't employable with a history and philosophy degree, so I went off to law school. My dad was a law professor, then he became a judge. He loved the law, he wanted me to love the law, I hated the law. And I quit after less than a semester, and so honestly, I took the first job I was offered, and that was to be a receptionist in a little nine-person real estate firm. Interestingly, that building is literally one block from the headquarters of Hewlett Packard and one of those weird coincidences of life. Ultimately, I settled down and got an MBA and started to work in Washington DC for a big company called AT&T.
Ted Roosevelt:
And I'm actually interested in the... Because it's a little bit of a out-of-vogue idea, that a liberal arts education is important, particularly the ones that you're talking about, a focus on philosophy and history. I presume but I want to confirm that you still believe that's true. In the current climate, a liberal arts education has great value.
Carly Fiorina:
Actually, I think it's more true than ever, and it's interesting because ultimately, I went on to MIT and got a master of science in business and did a lot of the quantitative work that business now requires. Of course, now many years later, business has gotten so technology-focused no matter what the business is, so quantitative, those skill sets and experience are important. However, decision-making and leadership requires perspective, and perspective comes from learning something about other times, other places, other cultures, other ideas.
Another thing I learned in the study of philosophy is how to reason, what reason is. Those are incredibly important in decision-making, particularly in a time that is so fast-moving, so fraught that the challenges are very complex. The decisions are never black and white, they're always gray. And of course, the other thing I would say is history has a lot to teach us, because while technology is new and industries are new and many things are new, in terms of human behavior, there is nothing new under the sun, and so we can learn a lot of lessons from history, our own and other people's as well.
Ted Roosevelt:
So let's talk about our history, and when I say that, I mean American history, because you've talked about how important American history is as a tool to deal with the current climate of division and the role that that plays. Can you unpack that a little bit? Why is American history so important to healing this nation's political discord?
Carly Fiorina:
We all share the experience of sitting around a family dinner party, and what inevitably happens is people start to talk about their family's past and who came before them. It always happens, and it happens because we realize intuitively that unless we know who we came from and where we come from, we don't know who we are. Our personal history is a mirror in which we look to see ourselves more clearly, and that is true of a community's history and a nation's history.
In a family, if you don't tell the whole story, the family is divided. Well, if you don't tell a community's whole story, the community is divided. If you don't tell a nation's whole story, the nation is divided. It's always true, but it's particularly true in this country. Why? Because this country is the only nation on the face of the Earth and in all of human history that was founded not on ethnicity, not on territory, not on religion, but on a set of ideas and ideals, documents, a system of government. So when Americans no longer know how those ideas came to be, why they were important, what the system of government is, we don't know who we are. We don't know our own story, which means what? It says we don't know why we're Americans.
Ted Roosevelt:
And so how can we tell the nation's full story, encompassing all the criticisms levied on the founding fathers today without diminishing the ideals?
Carly Fiorina:
So the short answer is the facts, all the facts, without judgment and without telling people what to think about the facts. So let me give you an example. Our founding fathers were indeed slaveholders. They did treat Indigenous peoples terribly, and their ideas and their writings changed the world, and we have to tell all those stories.
Recently, I was at an event at Fort Monroe. Fort Monroe, Virginia, was the place where the first ship carrying the enslaved landed in the new world. 32 souls survived the Middle Passage, and they landed at Fort Monroe. We had a commemoration. The commemoration included Project 1619, The Daughters of the American Revolution, 11 tribal nations in Virginia, the three cultures that came to together. We had descendants of those 32 original enslaved at that event. They talked about how they felt. It was a difficult set of subjects. It is difficult to talk about what those 32 people must have endured. It is difficult to talk factually and honestly about Virginia being the first place to institutionalize slavery, and yet this event was unifying. Because here's the thing. All the way back to our personal histories around the dinner table, the truth sets us free. You could just feel everybody exhaling and saying, "Okay, that is our story." But it turned into not recrimination, but a celebration of resilience.
Ted Roosevelt:
Carly, I love that. What's really powerful is the ability for people to sit in a room and have these difficult conversations and bring their own experiences, and have them all be validated around shared facts. And at the same time, it seems like there are fewer and fewer spaces for us to have these difficult conversations right now. Do you feel that that's true?
Carly Fiorina:
Look, I think what's going on is the environment, political toxicity infects everything. I also think the toxicity of social media infects everything, because social media encourages people to be rude, mean, curt. So all of those things conspire to make people feel as though it's really difficult to have a thoughtful, thorough conversation about a difficult topic, and yet in my experience, people crave it. And so I think what it means is those of us who care about it just have to do it. It's a little bit like if you build it, they will come. If you tell the stories and provide the space, people will come.
Ted Roosevelt:
When I was growing up in the eighties and the nineties, I felt like politicians would often appeal to our shared values, that that was a very common message for politicians. And today, it feels like maybe the inverse is happening, that there's a call to all our differences, an insistence on all our differences. Do you feel like the political system right now is actually undermining our shared values?
Carly Fiorina:
Yes, in the sense that politics is all about what divides us. I mean, we've been arguing about immigration for 50 years. We could solve it, but it's a great problem to get people fired up into the polls over, and it always has been. So the way politics works, the dialogue around politics makes it very difficult.
Ted Roosevelt:
This might sound like a trite question, but it feels important to me, to be explicit if you can about what you see as our shared values as a nation.
Carly Fiorina:
So let us start with the most fundamental of all. "We hold these truths to be self-evident." So we are founded first on an ideal that we are all equal in our dignity, in our liberty, in our ability to find our own way and build our own life. Now, of course, our nation has not lived up to that ideal, and much about our system of government was constructed in order to try and make progress towards that ideal, but second big idea, most important idea I think, the citizen is sovereign. Not government, not kings, not presidents, the citizen. So much of how our nation came to be was around this fundamental ideal, even though that fundamental ideal that we share, universal dignity and sovereignty and the ability to find our own way, was so obviously contradicted by the treatment of Indigenous people, the enslavement of others. So yes, glaring contradiction.
I do think there is a window of opportunity here. Both the right and the left seem to be talking a lot about the constitution these days. Well, good. Maybe we should know what's actually in it. But the other thing that makes this a window of opportunity is 2026. 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the founding of our nation. I guarantee you every politician is going to wrap themselves up in that, because they can't avoid it. And we're going to have fireworks and tall ships and all the rest, but we also need to have real education, real reflection. That I don't think the politicians will do, but they will draw our attention to the fact that we're 250 years old, so that's an opportunity.
Ted Roosevelt:
You are involved with VA 250. Can you talk about that organization and why you feel it's important?
Carly Fiorina:
Virginia 250 is all about the nation's semi-quincentennial. There are, by the way, 50 other state commissions that are all focused on the nation's semi-quincentennial. However, we in Virginia feel a special obligation. Why? Because Virginia is the crucible of the nation, it always has been. People don't really realize, but the first colonists landed in Virginia, not Plymouth Rock. The first encounters with Indigenous people happened in Virginia. The first slave ships carrying the enslaved happened in Virginia. The first representative government happened in Virginia. The Revolutionary Army was mustered in Virginia, and oh, by the way, every single founding document, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, written by a Virginian.
The father of our country, Virginian. I could go on and on, and so we have a very special obligation to tell those stories, to educate Virginians and Americans, to engage with every community. And our ultimate goal is to re-inspire people to understand and commit to their role as citizens, because we can't form a more perfect union without it.
Ted Roosevelt:
You mentioned the role of citizens and you've had a very successful career in business, so I wonder what your thoughts are around what role businesses should play in a civic community? Do they have a civic obligation as well?
Carly Fiorina:
So yes, I think if for no other reason than employers are among the most trusted organizations in our country, and so you have all these citizens out there who look to their employers, whoever they are, for some guidance. I think the role of businesses in our civil society is to make sure that their employees are educated about who we are, where do we come from? What are our founding ideas and ideals? What is the role of a citizen? Then I think where businesses get themselves in trouble is they take positions on particular issues or particular candidates. If we had businesses lean in and say, "You know what? We're going to get really excited about asking our employees to actually study the citizenship test, a hundred questions, and then actually see if they can pass it," that would be an unbelievable gift to the nation, because most people have no idea, most of the answers to that test.
Ted Roosevelt:
So when you talk to business leaders about that, what is the response you get? Because that seems like it could be controversial, having a business teach their employees about citizenship.
Carly Fiorina:
It's interesting, I get two responses. One is, "Let's just wait until this election is over." I mean, honestly, people are sort of paralyzed by the political process right now. The second reaction though is, "Wow, that's really interesting." And the reason I think businesses are finding it interesting is they find their own employees so divided that it's very difficult to sometimes engage employees in civil discourse about a difficult topic, and I think it's very hard to encourage civil discourse unless you start with something we all hold in common. What is it we hold in common? Well, we're all Americans. What does that actually mean? Here are our ideals and our ideas. Here is our system of government.
Ted Roosevelt:
Got it. That makes sense. Carly, you're also a leadership consultant, and I want to pivot to that a little bit as well, some of the lessons you impart to various leaders across society. And the first message that really comes to the fore for me is this idea of leadership as a choice. Can you talk more about that?
Carly Fiorina:
So leadership is a choice. People get confused because they think you automatically become a leader if you have a certain title, if you have a certain position, maybe even if you have a certain amount of wealth. So we think, oh, leadership is those things. It's not. It's not fame, it's not title. I've known plenty of people, as have you, with fame, title, position, power even, and they are not leading. And one of the reasons I think people choose not to lead is because it is hard and you will be criticized, always. I also tell people, and I think it's sometimes a relief, criticism is the price of leadership. Don't take it personally, it's the price. And so when I talked to leaders or people who want to be leaders, I said, "Your first choice is to be courageous." You have to have courage to move forward.
Ted Roosevelt:
I saw that quote that you had said in the past about criticism being the price of leadership, that if you're not being criticized, you're not making a difference, and that's a very TR concept.
Carly Fiorina:
Yes, it is.
Ted Roosevelt:
His Man in the Arena speech talks specifically about that. Do you feel like there is a vacuum around leadership in this country right now or a sense of fear about being criticized that's maybe greater than it has been in the past because of the threat of being swept up in a wave of criticism?
Carly Fiorina:
First of all, I think social media, it has many good qualities but it is a toxic environment, because we can go to our corners and just hear what we want to hear, and most people do, and so you get reinforced in whatever you want to think or whatever you want to do. That is not a recipe for leadership. It encourages you to go along and get along. I also think we have to be honest and say that over time, institutions start to preserve and protect and serve themselves. And so why do I bring that up? Because there are all of these processes and structures and metrics and rewards inside an institution that make it very difficult for individuals to break out. All those systems and processes, the message of all of them is stick to your lane. I tell people, look, most of the big, quote, "career breakthroughs" in my career were when I did not go along to get along, when I purposefully got out of my lane, and it's only by getting out of your lane that you can solve problems, period. And leadership ultimately is about solving problems, making things better.
Ted Roosevelt:
It strikes me that a big part of that, being able to get out of your lane and be a leader, is rooted in character, that that has to be a part of the puzzle.
Carly Fiorina:
Yes.
Ted Roosevelt:
Tell me about the role of character, and even before that, can you define character for us?
Carly Fiorina:
So I think character can be defined in many ways. Let me try a few. Character is knowing that how you do things is as important as what you get done. It's resilience, it's the ability to continue on. Character is the ability to admit a mistake. To say, "I don't know it all." Humility is a huge part of character. All those things define character, but I think the most important element of character to me, and I'm eternally grateful to my parents for drilling this into me, in the end, if all of your validation comes from others, then others will always tell you what to do. I think ultimately, a person of character has what I would call intrinsic motivation as opposed to a need for extrinsic validation.
Ted Roosevelt:
I am struck by talking about humility as a part of character and leadership, and we've spent some time on this podcast talking about the role of vulnerability for leaders. Is that something that you feel is a necessary and important component for leadership?
Carly Fiorina:
I think the words I would use are humility and humanity. I think a leader has to demonstrate humanity. That is, "I'm a real person, I'm not better than anyone else. I'm not different than anyone else. I'm human." The reason I'm quibbling over the word vulnerability is there are times when charting a difficult course, people get scared and dubious. And at those times, the leader must be strong and confident, even if they are quaking inside their boots, because otherwise, people lose faith.
I can tell you, General Washington as he crossed the Delaware was not internally fully confident that this was the right thing to do, and yet he had to say at that moment to his troops, "We are going, we can do this, and I will lead the charge." Humility though is so important because humility honestly is the regulator against the desire for power. So humility is, "I don't know it all. I can't do it all. I'm going to screw it up sometimes."
Ted Roosevelt:
I love that turn of phrase, humility is the regulator against the desire for power, and it makes me think of the relationship between humility and faith, which are often highly connected. I'm curious about the role faith has played in your leadership style.
Carly Fiorina:
For me, to have courage, to be motivated intrinsically, not solely by what other people say, to be able to admit a mistake and keep going, all of that requires a rock-solid conviction that there is something bigger than me. I think knowing there's something bigger, knowing that others have come before us and will come after us who will also wrestle with very difficult choices, knowing that the decisions you make are not about yourself, they're actually about others, I think all those things are incredibly important, and that for me is why faith matters.
Ted Roosevelt:
You've obviously had an incredibly successful career in business and politics. There must have been moments where things didn't break your way and you felt uncertain about the path forward. Can you talk about a specific one and how you got through it? Because I think a lot of people worry about those moments so much that they become risk avoidant, and it's helpful for them to hear the path through those moments.
Carly Fiorina:
And by the way, you're absolutely right, people are afraid of those moments and so they avoid risk or they make the wrong decision, so I will tell you a very specific story. When I was chair and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, we had very, as all boardrooms do, we had very confidential and important and strategic conversations in the boardroom, and I had two board members who decided they did not like the outcome of a decision that the board as a body made, and so they decided to take it upon themselves to go speak to the press. And I awoke to see front page headlines in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times with these two board members as anonymous sources talking chapter and verse about our discussion and why it was a bad decision. That is a violation of every code of conduct. It's a violation of a member's duty of care.
So I called a board meeting and I said, "This is unacceptable. I would like whoever these two board members are to come forward." They would not. I then went to the board and said, "As a matter of principle, these two board members must leave, and if they will not leave, then I must leave." So we had a standoff. I was chairman of the board. I could have cast the deciding vote that would've kept my job. I chose not to, knowing that what would happen as I departed HP, and I did depart, was that part of the story would never come out. The headlines all around the world would be, and they were all around the world, that I had been fired.
And I knew that going in, and yet for several days before that meeting, knowing it would present this set of options to me, I had to think through, am I going to stand for what I believe is the right conduct or not? In other words, while I was going to lose my job, honestly, the way I thought about it is if I don't do this, I will lose my soul, and I was not willing to do that. I do believe most people in leadership come down to at least one of those very hard choices. I've had more than one, but that was the most public.
Ted Roosevelt:
Carly, thank you for sharing that, and I don't know if you're comfortable, but I'm curious about the emotional arc after that experience. I think it's easy in retrospect to look back on those moments and say, "I stood on principle and I feel good about that," but it isn't always the immediate aftermath that somebody experiences.
Carly Fiorina:
Well, so a couple of things. Number one, I have an amazing husband. We'll celebrate 40 years of marriage next year.
Ted Roosevelt:
Congratulations.
Carly Fiorina:
Thank you. And he is my rock, he is my advisor, and so of course we talked this through for days ahead of time, and I talked it through with one or two other very close friends, but let's be candid. So by the time I got through all that, I was prepared, but oh my God, it sucked. I retreated to my house. I had a friend who called and said, "Don't read..." This was back when we actually had papers still, but, "Don't read the papers, don't listen to the radio." I mean, it was global news. It was global news because I was a very high profile CEO, in part because I was a woman and so different, but that's another story. For a couple of weeks, I just hunkered down, arranged flowers, cooked my husband dinner, anything to get through this, and then an interesting thing happened.
Employees wrote me, called me, people came by. My good friend Steve Jobs called me and said, "Carly, this board is idiotic. They'll regret this. They're going to look terrible." Ultimately, a year later, those two board members were fired. There was a big scandal in the boardroom. He said, "You're great. Just hang in there." In other words, I got reinforcement from people all over the place. People can be terrible. Of course, we know that, but in my experience, most people will see character and reward it. Most people will recognize courage and reward it. Most people will recognize leadership and reward it.
Ted Roosevelt:
Carly, we ask everybody on this podcast one question, and I'm going to be really interested by your answer, and it is what does it mean to you to be a good citizen?
Carly Fiorina:
Number one, know who we are and where we come from. A citizen must understand, citizen of what? Citizen of what? We are citizens of an imperfect, but nevertheless, the greatest nation in all of human history and on the face of the planet, formed around a perfect, and at the time, utterly radical idea of self-evident truths. You have to understand that as a citizen, know it, just as we have to understand who we are at a personal level and where we came from. Second, a citizen needs to be involved in what is happening around them, in your community, in your place of employment, in your house of worship. A citizen is by definition engaged in something larger than themselves.
And finally, to take on as our role, it's not just about our rights, our liberties and our freedoms and our incredible opportunities. Yes, it's about those things. It's also about our obligation to help form a more perfect union. We can all do that in lots of ways, that's why engagement is so important. But you can't do it, you cannot be a good citizen, you cannot help form a more perfect union if what you're absolutely paralyzed by is what everybody else thinks about me, some identity that's smaller than America but more important to you, and, "Oh my gosh, what will people say about me?" If you're paralyzed by those three things, you cannot be a citizen fulfilling your obligation to form a more perfect union.
Ted Roosevelt:
Carly, thank you so much for this conversation. It's been truly inspiring for me, and I really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.
Carly Fiorina:
Well, Ted, thank you so much for having me, and honestly, thank you for what you're doing, because you create a space for conversations that matter, and you do it with a credibility and a gravitas that draws people to you and to the subject. You are a citizen, mensch, that is helping to form a more perfect union, and TR would be proud.
Ted Roosevelt:
Thank you, Carly. I really do appreciate your kind words and your thoughtful answers to the questions. The discussion flowed so effortlessly. It was wonderful to have you.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, please share it with someone you know. It really helps us build our audience. Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.