Carly Fiorina Touts HP Experience In Her Bid For President

It’s official: Former HP CEO Carly Fiorina is running for president, and she’s hoping that her experience running one of the largest technology companies in the world will win over voters.

Fiorina — who will be joining us tomorrow at Disrupt NYannounced her presidential run on Twitter with a link pointing to her official website, CarlyforPresident.com. The site is heavy on making the business case for Fiorina becoming our next president, highlighting her career progression from secretary to one of the most powerful women in the world, as the first female leader of a Fortune 50 business.

It’s a very American story, how she started from the bottom and now is here.

The campaign site also touts her experience running HP — a global tech company — during one of the more challenging economic periods for global tech companies. Lest we forget, Fiorina joined HP as CEO in 1999, just about a year before the stock market collapse wiped out many of the dot-coms of the period.

CarlyforPresident.com refers to the financial results HP racked up while she was CEO, including doubling revenue and growing from the 28th to the 11th largest company in the U.S. However, it washes over many of the more controversial issues surrounding her leadership at the company.

Fiorina led HP through an unpopular merger with Compaq, which was opposed by board member Walter Hewlett and led to a proxy fight (which she won). Her tenure also included a reorganization of the business as part of the merger, which resulted in mass layoffs and the offshoring of American jobs — a policy she defended in the Wall Street Journal at the time. Fiorina was eventually ousted as CEO amid internal turmoil and a languishing stock price.

CarlyforPresident acknowledges some of the struggles Fiorina faced as HP’s CEO, but it defends her actions and even makes the analogy that the U.S. is in a similar state as HP when she joined. From the site:

Carly didn’t always make the most popular decisions at HP–but, time and time again, they would prove to be the right ones.

But even though her record as CEO speaks for itself, Carly faced headwinds from people who did not want to see HP change. They wanted to double-down on a flawed agenda that simply wasn’t sustainable against the new challenges of the 21st Century.

Our nation faces this very same problem today–where career politicians protect the current system that personally benefits them, but no longer works for the American people.

We’ll see if voters agree that Fiorina did the right thing for HP while she was CEO, and whether they agree that the U.S. government also needs a shakeup. In the meantime, we’ll have Fiorina join us and answer questions about how her experience in business will apply to her presidency and where she stands on the many important issues the country faces.