Fiorina tries to move on

NEW YORK – Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says she remains puzzled about why she was fired last year and contends two board members who were prominent in the company’s recent spying scandal likely engineered her ouster.

In her new memoir, “Tough Choices,” Fiorina says HP’s directors never made clear why they wanted her to go, and “didn’t have the courage to face me” to break the news.

“The decision to fire me – frankly I know more about what it wasn’t than what it was,” she said Monday in an interview. “It wasn’t about performance.”

HP’s stock had lost more than half its value in her 51/2-year tenure. But she believed the board agreed that the Internet bust and early 2000s recession were a major factor. And she found it odd that just before firing her the board had approved her plans for 2005.

She suspects, however, that her end at HP was sought by then-directors Thomas Perkins and George Keyworth, whom she saw as counterproductive meddlers. Before her firing she had rejected acquisitions and organizational changes they had suggested.

Perkins and Keyworth turned out to be linked powerfully again after Fiorina’s ouster, when her successor as chairwoman, Patricia Dunn, ordered the now-infamous investigation into boardroom leaks to the media. Perkins quit in protest and Keyworth resigned after admitting he had talked to reporters without approval from the other directors.

Fiorina said she was “shocked” and “sad” to learn of HP investigators’ tactics, which included impersonating directors, employees and journalists to obtain their phone records. Dunn and four other people have been charged by California’s attorney general.

“I think it did lift a veil on the dysfunction that existed in the boardroom,” said Fiorina, who had also felt plagued by directors’ leaks before she was fired. “And perhaps people have some better appreciation of what I was dealing with.”

Keyworth’s attorney, Reginald Brown, declined to comment on the specifics of Fiorina’s characterization. But Brown said Keyworth always did what he thought was best for HP, which has fared better on Wall Street since Fiorina left.

She has few nice things to say about Dunn, claiming “her opinions were frequently hard to discern.”

She also lambastes Michael Capellas, the former CEO of Compaq Computer Corp. who left HP six months after HP narrowly won its fight to acquire Compaq for $19 billion in 2002. Fiorina depicts Capellas as moody, irrational and “more interested in his own title and position than virtually everything else.”