Carly Fiorina, the former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard and now contender for the Republican presidential nomination, defended the thousands of layoffs she made at the company.
In an interview with Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric, Fiorina said that layoffs were a terrible decision to have to make. She was responding to news about a domain carlyfiorina.org, not owned by Fiorina or her campaign, which illustrated using 30,000 frowning-face emoticons the number of people that were laid off during her tenure at HP from 1999 to 2005.
Fiorina also defended her overall record at HP:
Here s what we did in six years, in the middle of the biggest technology recession in 25 years, we doubled the company to almost $90 billion, we took the growth rate from 2 percent to 9 percent, we tripled the rate of innovation to 11 patents a day, we quadrupled the cash flow. We went from lagging behind in every product category to leading in every product category.
It was a tough time I managed through, she said. We transformed a company from failing to succeeding.
In business, she said, one is held accountable, unlike politics, where no one is held accountable. She defended her record at HP:
What people need to know about me is I understand what making a tough call in a tough time with high stakes is all about. That s called executive decision making. I think that s what s needed in the Oval Office. You don t learn that in a book. You learn it by doing it.
Whether Fiorina s record in Silicon Valley will help or hurt her may depend on having some tech industry support, the Bay Area News Group s Josh Richman wrote.
It is also unclear Fiorina s ultimate political goal is, with some Republicans seeing her as an unlikely presidential contender and more likely a GOP contender for the vice president slot.
I don t know a single person who thinks she ll be our presidential nominee, California GOP Vice Chairwoman Harmeet Dhillon told Richman.
Above: Carly Fiorina (JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images)
