Carly Fiorina, Lucent & The California Senate Election

I get a huge number of hits on my first two Carly Fiorina-related posts concerning her past at Lucent.

At the time that I wrote them, Fiorina was locked in a death struggle for the GOP Senate nomination in California. I thought it worthwhile to remind Republican voters just how thin is the corporate "success" story on which all of Fiorina's appeal had been based.

But, for better or for worse, Carly won that primary. Yet, the hits keep on coming to those posts.

So let me state, for what it's worth, unequivocally that if I were a California resident/voter choosing between Fiorina and Boxer in the upcoming election, I'd vote for Carly.

Despite her dubious corporate achievements, and unprovable but suspect involvement in the Lucent sales forecasting caper, those are now moot points.

You have to ask yourself which candidate will do a better job cutting government spending and scope as the next California Senator. And that's indisputably going to be Fiorina.

You can worry in six years about her entrenchment, abuse of power, etc. But, in the current environment, if Christine O'Donnell, with fewer life accomplishments than Carly, can run as the GOP Senate candidate in Delaware, why not elect Fiorina over Boxer in California?

Primary Day & Carly Fiorina

My posts from last December regarding Carly Fiorina, here and here, have been among the most-views posts on this blog for at least the past three months.

One of them- the first, I believe- actually made it onto the Huffington Post as a link.

Perhaps, after today, the viewing of these posts will ebb. Then, again, if Fiorina beats her opponents, and faces Boxer in the November general election, the views will rise even more.

Either way, I'm going to be watching those California results.

California's GOP Senate Primary & Tea Parties

A weekend editorial by Allysia Finley in the Wall Street Journal decried the Tea Party members' effects on the California GOP Senate primary next week.

In her well-written piece, Ms. Finley suggested that Tea Party enthusiasts may be responsible for nominating a middle-of-the-roader, Tom Campbell, as they doubt Carly Fiorina's credentials, but can't deliver sufficient support for Chuck DeVore to nominate him.

I found it all a bit too hysterical. Having been to two Tea Party events since last October, both at the US Capitol, I can't say that I find the movement, such as it is, to be much more than a crystallization of conservative disgust with high taxes, too much government spending and a lack of a sense of reality by elected representatives of either party.

If you removed the words "Tea Party" from Ms. Finley's piece, it would merely describe a not atypical choice among voters in many elections.

I faced such a choice in New Jersey's general election for Governor last November. Chris Christie wasn't the true conservative in that race. He was the GOP moderate, well to the left of a much more conservative independent whose name I now cannot even recall. Corzine, of course, was the sitting uber-liberal.

Anytime three candidates vie for an office or nomination, you're going to have an unstable dynamic which can allow the moderate to triumph.

Isn't that part of our political system? Doesn't it discriminate for the majority, which is rarely rabidly conservative or liberal?

What's so unusual about next week's California GOP Senate race, in that regard?

Nothing at all.

But it seems to be yet another opportunity for someone to wring their hands about the "Tea Partiers" and their destructive effect upon yet another election.

Regarding Carly Fiorina & Lucent: Another Vintage Article

My prior post on this topic already attracted two comments.



"As a former HP person who worked mostly with AT&T and Lucent around the time of Carly's hiring by HP, I have heard a lot about this from many former Bell System people.

First of all, at the time I was told that Carly was quite likely about to be fired by Lucent. I was also told by numerous people - some of whom worked very closely with Carly - that she was "cooking the books" and had been caught."



"I really wish there was more solid evidence of Carly's knowledge and involvement in this scandal."

Searching on Nina Aversano, the key whistleblower in the case, I located this Fortune article from the period. The piece, by respected writer Carol Loomis, dates from a few years after the scandal- 2003, to be exact.

In it, she wrote,


"It is now 2 1/2 years later, and no one has donned stripes or even been indicted. Until the Aversano-Plunkett news came along, no one had even seemed about to be nailed by the SEC, which, though it cannot bring criminal charges against wrongdoers, can make their lives miserable with civil sanctions, such as forever barring them from big jobs in public companies. Even the matter of Aversano the Whistleblower has vaporized, culminating early this year in a settlement with deeply secret terms.

Meanwhile, Lucent's stock has been destroyed. From the peak of $258 billion, hit in December 1999, the company's market value has calamitously gone to $15.6 billion. (Included in that figure is $6.8 billion of current value for two companies that Lucent recently spun off, Avaya and Agere Systems.) And to people like Lucent's erstwhile chairman, Henry Schacht, that anemic $15.6 billion figure, reflecting a $2.13 share price for Lucent, looks almost thrilling: The company's shares got down to roughly a quarter of that in 2002."

In effect, Loomis notes that nobody really was ever held accountable for the fraud. Further, Lucent as much as admitted guilt by settling with Aversano, but on terms so strict that nobody's ever going to hear from her exactly what happened. Nor, one suspects, ever see the evidence, probably in the form of emails and memos, which Aversano held over Lucent's head.

One can muse about the potential for her to escape the terms, now that Lucent disappeared into Alcatel. But I wouldn't hold my breath, were I pursuing the truth behind this story.

For the purposes of this and the prior linked post, the question of Carly Fiorina's involvement in the scandal, these paragraphs in Loomis' article are germane,

"Chronologically, except for skullduggery not yet uncovered, the first move was Aversano's. Now 58, Aversano was a longtime Bell employee whom McGinn in May 2000 had made president of North American sales to the "service provider" companies--including the regional Bells and their many upstart competitors. In that important job, in this company that has been way above average in putting women into high-ranking spots, Aversano reported to executive vice president Patricia Russo.

Aversano, says a former Lucent financial executive, was a hard-charger who reminded him of still another woman, Carly Fiorina, who'd left Lucent in 1999 to become CEO of Hewlett-Packard. After Aversano was promoted, she oversaw about 3,000 people bringing in 25% of Lucent's revenues. Counting 100,000 options given her in early 2000, Lucent figured her pay for the year, so Aversano testified, at a handsome $4.5 million."

Loomis' timeline is what makes the second reader's comment remain true. Because Fiorina was technically out of Lucent and safely at HP when this story actually broke, it's always been assumed, I guess, that she was innocent.

Yet, from comments I've heard from a person who was on the scene before Carly beat it out of Dodge, so to speak, I believe that the entire sales mis-statement game was already underway before Aversano was promoted. The other reader's comments suggest similar sentiments from other Lucent employees at the time of the events.

But it's precisely because Fiorina was gone by 2000, and so much attention was paid to the Aversano-McGinn fracas, and the subsequent settlement sealed records, that any compelling evidence of her involvement would have to be unearthed as a result of concerted efforts.

Since this is about politics, what I'm saying is that any of Fiorina's rivals for the California Senate seat would probably have to do their own digging. They'd need to interview former Lucent employees to learn who was doing what, when, and then go find them to ascertain, independently, if there were any reason to implicate Fiorina in the earliest stages of the sales forecasting and reporting scandal.

Given the timeframe of this story being a decade ago, it's unlikely that more of the truth will ever be revealed, unless it happens during this Senate campaign. Absent that, it will probably recede into the past, forever undisturbed again.

Carly Fiorina's Checkered Corporate Past

While I don't live in California, I've observed, with interest, Carly Fiorina's campaign to win the GOP nomination for the Senate seat being elected next November.

Before Fiorina can take on the vulnerable Democrat, Barbara Boxer, she has to defeat a couple of competing Republicans.

With such a ferocious primary, and, no doubt, general election underway, I'm surprised there hasn't been more mention by Fiorina's competitors of her corporate background.

Specifically, her proximity to a sales forecasting scandal at Lucent, and, of course, he mismanagement of HP while serving as CEO.

The HP situation is the more well-known. Fiorina was viewed as having bungled the Compaq acquisition, and done some damage with her reorganizations of the firm and heavy-handed approach at the legendary but weakly-performing technology icon.

Back in the late 1990s, after Lucent's spinoff from ATT, this scandal erupted regarding overly-ambitious sales forecasts. Nina Aversano became a whistle-blower and subsequently embroiled in a lawsuit with Lucent for breach of contract.

Guess who was head of the sales force at the time? Carly Fiorina.

I've always marveled at how Fiorina escaped being touched by the scandal which became rather sensational. I recently spoke with an old ATT colleague who was aware of the situation, and my suspicions were echoed. Mind you, I do not have proof that Fiorina was involved. But what I've learned is sufficient to convince me, personally, that she probably was, or, as head of sales, certainly aware.

Thus, it's hard for me to believe that some political opponent wouldn't be pursuing their own sources to unearth the truth about that two decade-old accounting scandal.

It may seem forgettable now, but, at the time, the newly-launched Lucent was depending upon information such as sales forecasts to drive its ever-increasing share price. A price which unexpectedly plummeted soon thereafter.

Perhaps memories of such distant corporate scandals have so faded that nobody will bother. But, to me, between that incident and Fiorina's HP experience, I would have a hard time understanding why I was voting for her for a Senate seat.