Thread: 'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore'

From 2004 on outsourcing.

US tech industry stands up for overseas jobs

'There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore'

8 Jan 2004 at 12:30, Drew Cullen

America's IT industry is looking at the foreign competition - and it's worried. A group of eight leading CEOs, all members of the Computer Systems Policy Project, is calling on the US government to help the country stay on top of the technology tree.


The CSSP wants better R&D tax credits, more federal investment in science, and stronger government support for the roll-out of broadband. It is seeking a meeting with the Bush administration to set out its agenda, which will cost billions of dollars a year if implement.


At the same time, the advocacy group is urging the government to ignore calls to erect trade barriers, and to resist moves to limit the ability of computer companies to move jobs overseas. Protectionism would make America less competitive and would provoke retaliation, it argues in this document (2.5MB PD).


In a press conference launching the CSSP campaign yesterday, Carly Fiorina, HP's CEO, said: "There is no job that is America's God-given right any more. We have to compete for jobs as a nation. Our competitiveness as a nation is not inevitable. It will not just happen."


Speaking at the same conference, Intel CEO Craig Barrett said the annual US bill for agricultural subsidies - $30bn - represented an investment "in the industries of the 19th century". By contrast, the annual federal investment in science is just $5bn, he noted.


The CSSP characterises the debate between the globalisers and what it (and we) term protectionists as "Do we compete or do we retreat". America, it says, must never compete in the battle to see who can pay their workers least". But it will take thoughtful leadership to ensure success.


A big political head of steam appears to be building in the States over moving tech jobs overseas. According to the San Jose Mercury, several bills have been introduced in Congress by members off both parties seeking to stem the move of hi-tech jobs offshore. Gartner, the tech analyst firm, last year forecast that one in 10 tech industry jobs would move overseas in 2004, while one in 20 tech jobs in end-user enterprises would shift offshore in the same time. Unlike most overseas transfers, these are middle class jobs which are being "lost".


To date, America's consumers are the biggest beneficiaries of globalisation. A lean and competitive US hi-tech industry will ensure the preservation of many high value jobs that would otherwise be lost, as overseas rivals notched up more market share. A competitive tech industry also means that customers pay less. That's the theory anyway.


Millions of high value jobs will be lost in the US. Sure there will be replacements, but of what calibre? It is possible the value of the skills of survivors such as software development and sysadmin nous will be permanently depressed, when compared with the heyday of the late 90s and 2000.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/01...try_stands_up/


The Donald was not just making a personal attack at the debate. There is a lot of consensus on Fiorina's performance as a CEO

Portfolio's Worst American CEOs of All Time

83

19. Carly Fiorina

A consummate self-promoter, Fiorina was busy pontificating on the lecture circuit and posing for magazine covers while her company floundered. She paid herself handsome bonuses and perks while laying off thousands of employees to cut costs. The merger Fiorina orchestrated with Compaq in 2002 was widely seen as a failure. She was ousted in 2005.

THE STAT: HP stock lost half its value during Fiorina’s tenure.

HP's Company Website

Read more

By Portfolio.com

http://www.cnbc.com/2009/04/30/Portf...me.html?page=3

Carly is NOT an "outsider". Check out the boards that she sits on. I think she is Establishment GOP all the way.

By STEVE TOBAK MONEYWATCH April 27, 2012, 5:58 PM
America's worst CEOs: Where are they now?

Behind Bars
IMAGE COURTESY OF FLICKR USER ABARDWELL

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(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Last week, I was watching Nokia's (NOK) meltdown and remembering the CEO who more or less brought the once dominant cell phone maker to its knees,Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo.When it was all but obvious that Nokia had completely missed the market transition to smartphones, when the board of directors was quietly interviewing new CEO candidates, Kallasvuo was still in complete denial about his critical missteps and staggering lack of vision and strategic planning.
That got me thinking about a subject that never ceases to both amaze and appall me. How bad -- even horrendously bad CEOs that cost shareholders billions and thousands of employees their jobs -- don't just get fired and fade into oblivion. They get recycled, meaning they either get other CEO jobs, get to sit on all sorts of boards of directors, or run for public office.
10 worst CEOs of 2011
Are CEOs worth it?
CEOs are scared for their jobs -- about time

Here are seven of the worst CEOs I've written about over the years and what they're doing now. And don't ask about Enron's Jeff Skilling or WorldCom's Bernie Ebbers -- they're both doing fine in their fashionable orange jumpsuits in federal prison. That said, former Tyco (TYC) CEO Dennis Kozlowski is now participating in a work-release program in the 79th month of his prison term for robbing shareholders blind of millions in fraudulent bonuses and loans.
Gerald Levin, former CEO of Time Warner (TWX). After famously merging Time Warner with AOL at the peak of the dot-com bubble -- widely believed to be one of the dumbest moves in the history of corporate America -- Jerry Levin dropped out of site and emerged as Chairman of Oasis TV, chairperson of StartUp Health, chairman of Organized Wisdom, and presiding director of Moonview Sanctuary, a "holistic healing institute." No kidding.
Bob Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot (HD) and Chrysler. Named one of the "Worst American CEOs of all time" by CNBC after sending Chrysler into bankruptcy, Nardelli served as interim CEO for gunmaker Freedom Group and director of NewPage Corp. He recently stepped down as CEO of the operations and advisory company at private equity giant Cerberus Capital Management, which owned all those companies.
Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems. After serving as president and COO at Sun since 2004, replacing Scott McNealy as CEO in 2008, failing to turn the Silicon Valley giant around, and presiding over who knows how many "death by a thousand cuts" restructurings and layoffs, Schwartz finally sold the company to Oracle (ORCL). He's now co-founder and CEO of caregiver software startup CareZone and serves on the boards of Taleo (TLEO), Silver Spring Networks, and Moxie Software.
Mike Zafirovski, former CEO of Nortel. After failing to turn around the 110 year-old Canadian network giant, sending Nortel into bankruptcy, selling off the company in pieces, and suing the bankrupt company for $12 million, last year Zafirovski was hired as a senior advisor to private equity firm The Blackstone Group (BX) and appointed to the board of Apria Healthcare. He's also a director at Boeing (BA).
Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, former CEO of Nokia. Kallasvuo was recently elected to the board of directors of Europe's fifth-largest telecom company, TeliaSonera (TLSNF). He's also vice chairman of SRV Group and is a board member of Aperios Group, European Design Leadership Board, and the Finnish Foundation for Economic Education. Nice.

Gary Forsee, former CEO of Sprint. After a long career in telecom, Forsee became CEO of Sprint (S) in 2004 and wasted no time engineering a disastrous merger with Nextel. He was ousted by the board in 2007 and still managed to walk away with an exit package of over $40 million. And get this: Before his last day at Sprint Nextel (S), he was already hired as president of the University of Missouri System, a position he held until 2011. He's also served as a director of Ingersoll-Rand (IR), Great Plains Energy (GXP), Goodyear Tire & Rubber (GT), and various civic and nonprofit organizations.

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of HP (HPQ). Unless you've lived under a rock for the past 10 years, you know that Fiorina engineered HP's controversial merger with Compaq, was ousted by the board in 2005, and later lost a bid to replace incumbent Barbara Boxer as U.S. Senator for California. But you probably don't know that, earlier this week, she was named chairman of the board of nonprofit Good360. The cancer survivor also serves on a number of other nonprofit boards and councils and is a former director of Kellogg (K), Cisco (CSCO), Merck (MRK), and Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM).
No doubt, someday I'll be writing about the exploits and board seats of former Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang, former SAP (SAP) and HP CEO Leo Apotheker, Kodak (EK) CEO Antonio Perez, and former Research In Motion (RIM) co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. But that's another story for another day.

Image courtesy of Flickr user abardwell
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/americas...-are-they-now/

Posted 2/15/2005 10:16 PM Updated 2/16/2005 4:28 AM


Can Fiorina trump competition for 'worst tech CEO' title?

Welcome to American Ouster — where former technology CEOs who were booted by their boards compete to see who did the most damage to their companies.

Now, that would be a heck of a reality series. Like Donald Trump's The Apprentice, only upside down and backward.

As you might expect, the idea for such a show is sparked by the emergence of a hot new contestant: Carly Fiorina, who was tossed out by Hewlett-Packard's board last week. During her reign of six years, she remade H-P about as successfully as William Shatner remade Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. (He really recorded that song!)

Fiorina was bad. Everyone seems to agree on this now, even though until about two months ago the conventional wisdom was that she was very good. But opinions can change fast. We once adored Michael Jackson.

In the panoply of deposed executives, just how bad was Fiorina? How does she rate among her peers who are probably walking golf courses in Florida as we speak?

Because Fiorina actively destroyed a vital corporate culture, does that make her better or worse than, say, former IBM CEO John Akers, who nearly buried his company because of inaction?

To find out, we asked four business school professors to rate six prominent tech industry oustees. Not that there aren't plenty of oustees from other industries — Phil Condit of Boeing, Jacques Nasser of Ford — but tech seems to get more of them. It has a lot to do with the pace of change. It's the difference between brownies and Moore's Law, as Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told me in December.

"I worked at Procter & Gamble for two years," Ballmer said. "It's probably fair to say that brownies — I worked on brownie mix — the brownie mix business looks more likely quite similar 10 years from now as opposed to quite different than it does today. But the fact that the (tech) market is dynamic means for us we have to stay on our feet."

Anyway.Here are the six tech CEOs on this episode of American Ouster: Fiorina, Akers, John Sculley of Apple, Robert Allen of AT&T, Chris Galvin of Motorola and Joe Nacchio of Qwest

And the business school profs: Robert Kelley of Carnegie Mellon University, Jeff Cannon of the University of North Carolina, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld of Yale University and S.P. Kothari of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So now — please welcome the contestants!



USA TODAY
IBM's Akers

•Akers. IBM's CEO from 1985 to 1993, he guided the company through the worst years in its long history. As personal computers took hold, Akers' IBM failed to move to a new computing era, ultimately losing $8 billion a year before the board canned Akers and hired Lou Gerstner.

Both UNC's Cannon and MIT's Kothari put Akers among the worst of the worst CEOs for failing to see what was coming and then riding the ship down like the captain of the Titanic. Kelley puts Akers more in the middle, yet says, "He did not see that IBM needed to change."


USA TODAY

Apple's Sculley

Sculley. Apple's CEO from 1983 to 1993, he pushed out Steve Jobs, tried to remake Apple into more of a commodity computer maker selling to corporations. He pushed his pet project, the handheld Newton — which did not work and did not sell.
"He took one of the most innovative companies and never innovated," Kelley says. "He misjudged what Apple is all about."
"Sculley might have lacked the creative instinct needed to succeed in tech," Kothari says.


USA TODAY
AT&T's Allen

Allen. AT&T CEO from 1988 to 1997, he forced a disastrous merger with computer company NCR (sound familiar, Carly?), then spun NCR off again later. Allen did the deal because he thought that computers and communication were merging, which shows you that timing is everything: AT&T today is diving into VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), which means technology is just getting to the point when computers and communication are merging.
Allen "wasn't astute about what was really happening in the industry," Cannon says. Or as Kothari put it, "He seemed clueless."

Motorola's Galvin

Galvin. Motorola CEO from 1997 to 2003, he had the unfortunate burden of being the grandson of the founder and son of the company's most successful CEO — and the even worse burden of being CEO after the tech bubble burst.
"I believe he was largely the victim of the tech meltdown," Kothari says. The other profs really had nothing bad to say about Galvin, making Galvin kind of the William Hung of this group. To Galvin's credit, he wouldn't make the cut.


Qwest's Nacchio AP


•Nacchio. Qwest's CEO from 1997 to 2002, he brashly set out to make a new telecommunications superpower but wound up with the equivalent of a second-tier regional Bell and the shame of an accounting scandal.
Kelley and Kothari rate Nacchio harshly, putting him among their worst. Kothari says Nacchio resorted to financial shenanigans "instead of devising creative ways of overcoming difficulties."

Getty Images

H-P's Fiorina

•Fiorina. H-P's CEO from 1999 to 2005, she forced a merger with Compaq, eviscerated H-P's culture and tried to make H-P a computing giant. Instead, H-P is an IBM also-ran that makes most of its money on printer cartridges.

The profs are all over the map about Fiorina. Kothari praises her for conviction in pursuing her strategy. On the other end, Sonnenfeld labels her "the worst because of her ruthless attack on the essence of this great company," noting that "she destroyed half the wealth of her investors and yet still earned almost $100 million in total payments for this destructive reign of terror."


All in all, our judges seem to think Fiorina should win. But in theAmerican Idol tradition, our American Ouster winner will be determined by you. Please vote online in our Quick Question. We'll tell you how it turns out.

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money...15-maney_x.htm


Kevin Maney has covered technology for USA TODAY since 1985.

Besides not getting work at any of Trump's company's I hope she will not get a job in his administration.

I think Carly is having a midlife crisis.