Carly Fiorina
About
About Carly Fiorina - First Women CEO of a Fortune 50 company, Best-selling Author, Keynote Speaker on Effective Leadership:
Former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina is a true leader and seasoned problem-solver. She passionately advocates for problem-solving, innovation, and effective leadership. Her mission is to inspire, equip, and connect individuals and teams to seize opportunities, face challenges, and accelerate impact in their communities and workplaces. She believes everyone has more potential than they realize and that those closest to the problem understand it best. Leading to unlock potential in others can result in progress and joy.
Carly’s experience spans from secretary to CEO, public to private, and for-profit to non-profit. She started as a secretary for a nine-person real-estate business and became the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 company. When Carly led Hewlett Packard (HP) in 1999, the industry faced the worst technology recession in 25 years. Under her leadership, revenue grew, innovation tripled, growth quadrupled, and HP became the 11th largest U.S. company.
During her tenure at HP, the company received numerous civic recognitions, including being named one of the 100 Best Corporate Citizens by Business Ethics Magazine, one of the 100 Best Companies for Working Mothers by Working Mother Magazine, receiving a 100% rating by The Human Rights Campaign Foundation’s Corporate Equality Index, and being named one of the World’s Most Respected Companies by The Financial Times and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
After leaving HP, Carly focused on giving back. Before Unlocking Potential, she served as Chairman of Good360, the world’s largest product philanthropy organization, and Chairman of Opportunity International, a Christian-based organization lifting millions out of poverty through micro-finance. She also founded the One Woman Initiative with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to empower women in Pakistan, Egypt, India, and the Philippines through increased economic opportunity.
Carly was appointed by President Bush and CIA Director Michael Hayden to serve as Chairman of the External Advisory Board of the CIA after 9/11. She held the highest clearances available to a civilian and focused on CIA recruitment policies, information technology capabilities, and organizational integration.
Carly is also a best-selling author. Her titles include Tough Choices and Rising to the Challenge. Her third book, Find Your Way, is out now.
Topics
What Carly Fiorina Talks About:
From Secretary to CEO: A Transformative Story of Leadership
Solving problems, effectively empowering employees, and driving results are the expectations of today’s leaders, at all levels and in every sector.
In a powerful, pragmatic presentation, Carly shares her transformative career story: from secretary for a nine-person real estate business, to becoming the first woman to lead a FORTUNE 50 company, as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
She delivers reflections and lessons learned from a journey on which she solved the problems in front of her and unlocked the potential of those around her.
Based on her own renowned experiences, and with an innate ability to help others reach their highest leadership potential, Carly imparts how leaders can be clear-eyed about their current state, optimistic about their future, and deliberate about getting the results they want.
Building a High-Performance Culture: Lessons from a High-Profile Assignment
As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina successfully tackled complicated business challenges – strategic focus, product innovation, and mergers and integration – all during the dot.com boom and bust and the worst technology recession in 25 years.
The company’s success can be attributed to Carly’s invaluable foresight: for HP to survive, she had to transform its complacent culture into a dynamic, innovative environment that would enable the company to become the industry leader.
From her renowned leadership of HP, Carly shares her personal account of what it takes to create a high-performance culture. She openly discusses navigating a challenging path filled with hurdles like major acquisition, integration, and transformational change.
For today’s organizations that are forced to adjust in an incessantly volatile business environment, she provides a blueprint for navigating uncertainty, managing change, and building a high-performance culture – all critical keys to empowering and driving results.
Unlocking Potential: Leaders Exist Everywhere
Throughout her career, Carly Fiorina has developed leaders and problem solvers in nearly every sector, from for-profits and non-profits, to faith-based communities and academia.
She believes that leadership is not about an impressive title or possessing the corner office, but about effectively solving problems and unlocking the potential of those around you.
Productive members of today’s workforce are increasingly interested in professional growth and development through their surrounding communities, and companies in every industry must provide the tools and resources to meet these very practical needs and foster tomorrow’s leaders.
Based on her work leading the Unlocking Potential Foundation, Carly delivers a powerful presentation that inspires, empowers, and connects employees at every level.
She shares her proven leadership philosophy, which is based on a set of human behaviors and characteristics that everyone can develop and deploy, as well as a set of practical tools that enable effective problem-solving.
Learning from Out Past: Linking History to Today
History can and should be strategically leveraged to help us navigate today’s extremely turbulent times. Instead, too often, we romanticize history, confusing nostalgia for the real thing. Or, we compartmentalize the past and focus only on those aspects that serve a particular rhetorical or political purpose. Sometimes, we even place historic figures on a lofty pedestal that renders them both un-human and un-real, and we cannot expect to emulate what is out of reach.
But, when we combine knowledge and experience about what works in the real world with the principles and ideals upon which our country was founded, then change is possible. This interplay between practicality and ideals is America’s story; practicality and idealism are our gifts to the world.
It’s imperative that we distill practical, real-world fundamentals from our founding ideals of the past, and apply to our present.
With her deep understanding of history, Carly Fiorina offers an insightful assessment of how to, and what we can learn from, our past. She connects historic events and figures to the current complex issues confronting both our nation and the world.
Recent Publications
Carly surpassed our expectations – her message was powerful and resonated with our clients who are struggles to rebuild their practices after COVID significantly disrupted our industry. She took the time to understand our unique needs as an organization and our audience’s struggles. This allowed her to tailor her message in a way that connected with out customers and executives, and gave them actionable insights they could apply in practice immediately