Carly Fiorina Was Ahead of Her Time
Now Playing: Phoenix - Everythign is Everything (Live)
Topic: Creative Class
I happened to bounce over to Fortune.com a couple days before their now famous cover story, "Why Carly's Big Bet Is Failing," which came out two weeks before Carly Fiorina was officially booted out by H-P's board on Feb. 8th.





Despite all of the flack that she has received about and since her departure, I've come across two ringing endorsements of Carly in my readings on globalization, econonomic development, and innovation.

Friedman mentions her in his recent NYT op-ed piece on why the world is becoming more flat (i.e. technology is allowing more and more people to enter the market place and compete with one another- convergence).
"Now the real information revolution is about to begin as all the complementarities among these collaborative tools start to converge. One of those who first called this moment by its real name was Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O., who in 2004 began to declare in her public speeches that the dot-com boom and bust were just ''the end of the beginning.'' The last 25 years in technology, Fiorina said, have just been ''the warm-up act.'' Now we are going into the main event, she said, ''and by the main event, I mean an era in which technology will truly transform every aspect of business, of government, of society, of life.''"

These ideas got me back to Richard Florida, who I've posted on many times before and wrote a HBR article entitled "America's Looming Creativity Crisis" in Oct. 2004.

Florida spoke at my alma-matter last November and in his talk (transcript here) mentions that it was Carly who back in 2002 said that for H-P's decisions to relocate or develop new facilities, the tradiitional tools of economic development policy didn't matter. Tax breaks, incentives, and infrastructure, keep that stuff. "We go where the highly skilled and creative people are. End of story.?

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I thought this connection was worth noting. Not sure if others will find this post worhtwhile but this is what the web is for, making connections between seemingly disparate piece of information. I love having these ah-hah moments where I can link together different pieces of information to create new knowledge. Its this kind of knowledge creation that I want this blog to capture. Now if I could get software or Google to help me find, create, monitor, or track these kind of ah-hah moments as I'm reading and surfing the internet, then I'd have a real valuable knowledge-generating application. Hmmm...