Demagogue

This week, Hewlett-Packard announced that it had ousted its controversial CEO, Carly Fiorina. The reasons?

Critics say Fiorina's desire for power has left H-P a lumbering giant stuck between business powerhouse IBM and low-price leader Dell. The company is fiscally sound but makes almost all its money from printer ink. It has no clear succession plan and a business model that some tech analysts say is so flawed the company should be broken up.

... In 2001, Fiorina made her boldest move by agreeing to acquire Compaq Computer. The $18 billion deal sparked protests from many shareholders, who argued Compaq would weaken H-P .... The Compaq merger has done little to boost H-P's stock, and critics say the deal has failed to produce expected benefits. It's gotten so bad that H-P may be forced to write off some of the value of the deal's intangible benefits ...

Before H-P, Fiorina was a senior executive at Lucent. By January 2000, less than seven months after Fiorina left Lucent, the company's stock price had begun a free-fall. That month, MotleyFool, an independent financial news and commentary source, wrote:

To put it simply, Lucent's management screwed up. They mis-executed on a number of fronts, including manufacturing bugaboos and being out of touch with their customers' technology needs. Whether Lucent's management was focusing on short-term incentives or whether they simply lost control over a business beset by competition on every side is open for debate ... This announcement was merely a continuation of a string of troubles in the company's core business.

In other words, the roots of Lucent's troubles were traced back to decisions made by senior management at a time when Fiorina was among them.

When Fiorina packs up her office at H-P this week, she may be tempted to rent a Brinks armored truck -- her severance package is worth about $21 million. So what will Fiorina do now?

Carly Fiorina's next stop may be Republican politics, a turn political pundits have speculated about for some time. She could run for California office or take a job in the Bush administration, where she has been close to the president ...

I'm feeling a strange sense of deja vu.

Let's see. Can you think of anyone else whose business acumen was less than stellar, but who still managed to come out of business ventures with a hefty amount of cash? Someone who then turned his eye toward GOP politics?