Fiorina parts ways with HP; could she run Nortel next?

As Hewlett-Packard reports its fourth-quarter earnings this week, the legendary Palo Alto, Calif., computing company will do so without Carly Fiorina, who was forced out of her posts as chairman and CEO of the firm last week, after an apparently rocky relationship with the HP board of directors reached an impasse.

It's still unclear what Fiorina, 50, once a star executive at Lucent Technologies, might do next. However, one industry analyst said a return to telecom to work at Nortel is one possibility.

“She could run Nortel,” said Ragu Gurumurthy, vice president at Adventis. “She definitely has what it takes to run a telecom company.”

William Owens has been president and CEO of Nortel since last spring, but the company doesn't have a chief operating officer, and five of its board members, including Chairman Red Wilson, are departing when their terms are up this year. The company also has been haunted by financial scandal.

Joining Nortel would be an ironic move for Fiorina, who was a fast-rising executive at Nortel nemesis AT&T Network Systems during the 1980s and 1990s before helping to spin off the company from AT&T in 1996 and re-brand it as Lucent.

But, Gurumurthy also questioned whether or not Fiorina would want to return to a telecom vendor, since most of them are much smaller, tighter operations than they were six years ago.

Fiorina left Lucent in 1999 to take the reins as CEO of HP, becoming the first woman ever to lead one of the 20 largest corporations in the country. She was touted industrywide as a model for the ascendance of women to corporate leadership positions. She also was viewed as bringing a fresh perspective to one of the oldest and biggest names in computing.

Now she has been replaced, at least for the interim, by a 36-year veteran of HP. Robert Wayman, chief financial officer of the company, has been named interim CEO while the company's board of directors begins a search for Fiorina's replacement. HP board member Patricia Dunn has taken over as chairman.

Gurumurthy said well-known technology executives such as Motorola CEO Ed Zander, MCI CEO Michael Capellas (who worked under Fiorina after HP acquired his former employer, Compaq, in 2001) and IBM executive John Joyce could be among the names HP will consider during its search.

The announcement of Fiorina's departure came just days before HP's quarterly earnings call this week, and one month before the company's scheduled annual shareholders meeting. While the press release from HP stated that Fiorina had stepped down, comments from board members and from Fiorina herself suggested she did not do so voluntarily. “While I regret the board and I have differences about how to execute HP's strategy, I respect their decision,” Fiorina said in a statement.

On a conference call last week, Dunn said that the company's board asked Fiorina at a meeting held last week — after several weeks of deliberation — to step down over differences in how to “execute” corporate strategy.

Dunn credited Fiorina with “laying a solid foundation for success in the marketplace. She was brought in to catalyze a transformation at Hewlett-Packard. She did so in a remarkable fashion [and] executed the merger [with Compaq] in superior fashion.” But, without adding specifics, Dunn said, “Going forward, we think the job is reliant on hands-on execution.”

Gurumurthy said the departure should have “no impact at all on HP's ability to succeed in the telecommunications market.”