Why Fiorina’s failure as a CEO ensures she’d fail as president

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Carly Fiorina was a lousy corporate executive, and she’d make a lousy president. Why? Because she has no idea how difficult it is to actually be president and get things done.

The former CEO of Hewlett-Packard HPQ, -3.16% wowed the Republican base last night at the candidates’ second debate with her strong conviction that all you need is a steely gaze and a will of iron to turn this country around and solve all its problems, foreign and domestic.

 In defense of her failed leadership at H-P, which concluded with her forced ouster, Fiorina said last night that “when you challenge the status quo, you make enemies.”

 Other than the thousands of employees she fired, Fiorina’s biggest enemies at H-P were in the board of directors, which like all corporate boards, is made up of uninformed people who nevertheless think of themselves as geniuses, busy people who have their own companies and interests to worry about and don’t have time for your petty problems.

 “I was a terrific CEO, the board was dysfunctional,” Fiorina said.

 Well, I have a surprise for you, Carly: If you think a corporate board is dysfunctional, wait until you see Congress.

 And if you think challenging the status quo in Washington or on the world stage will be a cakewalk, you’ll fail as president just as you failed as CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

 The biggest lie our politicians tell us is that it’s easy to fix our nation’s problems. All you need is the will, and you can accomplish anything. But none of them — with the possible exceptions of former First Lady Hillary Clinton and long-time congressional leader John Kasich — understands how impotent our political leaders really are.

Carly Fiorina

 Our government is a messy mix of oligarchy, democracy, republicanism and federalism that guarantees that almost nothing can get done. At least, not without a huge struggle.

 That is not a bug of our political system; it’s a feature. It’s the way our founding fathers planned it. They didn’t want a king, or a queen, not even a steely-eyed former CEO.

 Barack Obama was elected in 2008 primarily because he persuaded us that fixing our problems would be easy. All we needed was hope and audacity, and we can do it. Yes we can!

 But when Obama got into office, he was quickly schooled.

 Even though the Democratic Party had huge majorities in both houses of Congress and Obama personally had an immense mandate from the people to “change the way Washington works,” he was forced to compromise from Day One. Even a Congress led by allies won’t be dictated to.

 His stimulus package didn’t fully please anyone, his health-care reform bill didn’t fully please anyone, his rewrite of financial regulations didn’t fully please anyone. His foreign policy — from Afghanistan and Iraq to China and Ukraine — didn’t fully please anyone.

 Being president means never pleasing anyone completely, especially yourself. It takes a rare leader serving at the perfect time to overcome our system’s programmed hostility to efficiency.

 It would be nice if the candidates running for president would admit that, but if they did, they’d all sound like John Kasich, and none of them want to be the reasonable one on the stage.

Being realistic is such a turnoff! It’s much better to pound your chest and fire up the base and pretend that the president of the United States can accomplish anything. Build a wall! Put Putin in his place! Grow the economy at 4%!

 It’s easy; all you need is a steely gaze and will of iron.

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Who is Carly Fiorina

If you know Carly Fiorina is running for the Republican presidential nomination, you probably know at least one other thing about her: that she once ran Hewlett-Packard — and was fired from the company. But did you know she attended high school in … Ghana? That’s one of many places she went to school. Fiorina, 61, was born in Austin, Texas, and had a peripatetic childhood thanks to her law-professor father’s career. Fast forward to the present, and she’s being hailed for a strong performance in Wednesday night’s Republican debate. Here are five things to know about Fiorina — besides the rockiness of her tenure at H-P.

 ‘Perpetually the new kid’: In her memoir, “Tough Choices,” Fiorina describes herself in her early years as “perpetually the new kid in class.” She writes that she went to elementary school in New York, Connecticut and California. Junior high was in California and England. For high school, it was Ghana, California and North Carolina. “In the course of all this moving around, I learned a lot about people and a lot about change,” she writes in her book.

Her favorite college subject wasn’t economics:Fiorina’s academic résumé doesn’t start off sounding like that of a CEO. Though she later got an MBA, her undergraduate degree from Stanford University is in medieval history and philosophy. In a 2001 commencement speech at her alma mater,“The most valuable class I took at Stanford was not Econ 51. It was a graduate seminar called, believe it or not, Christian, Islamic and Jewish Political Philosophies of the Middle Ages.” Why was it so valuable? Distilling “huge texts” into two-page papers was a great intellectual workout, she told students. “Through the years, I’ve used it again and again — the mental exercise of synthesis and distillation and getting to the very heart of things.”

Carly Fiorina

She lost a Senate race by 10 points: If you’re not a political junkie, you may not recall that Fiorina ran for the U.S. Senate from California in 2010. She lost. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, won the race by nearly 10 percentage points. Yet polls during the race showed Fiorina as close as a point away from Boxer — evidence of her appeal in a traditionally blue state. The race is also remembered — not least by Boxer — for Fiorina’s calling her opponent’s hairstyle “so yesterday.”

She lost a daughter: During Wednesday’s debate, Fiorina said she had “buried a child to drug addiction.” That child was stepdaughter Lori, who died in 2009 at age 35. After relating the experience, Fiorina said the U.S. must invest more in drug-treatment programs. It became the most-searched moment of the debate, the Washington Post reported.

She opposes requiring paid maternity leave: The issue of paid maternity leave didn’t come up in Wednesday night’s debate, but it’s been in the news with Yahoo YHOO, -1.50% CEO Marissa Mayer saying she plans on taking minimal leave after the birth of the twins she is expecting. Fiorina’s take: The government shouldn’t require companies to offer such leave. “I’m not saying I oppose paid maternity leave,” she told CNN in August. “What I’m saying is I oppose the federal government mandating paid maternity leave to every company out there.” On this issue she sounds much different from the only other major female candidate seeking the White House, Democrat Hillary Clinton. “The United States is the only country in the developed world without guaranteed paid leave of any kind. That has to change,” Clinton’s website states.

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Remittances inch up in July 2015

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines) —A strengthening U.S. dollar and a depreciation of several currencies around the world partly caused a slower growth in personal remittances from overseas Filipinos (OFs) last July, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP). 

 The central bank revealed on Tuesday (September 15) that personal remittances grew by an annualized 0.5 percent to $2.3 billion last July, in contrast to the comparable 7.3 percent increase logged during the same month last year. 

 Such funds from land-based workers with contract of one year or more grew by 5.4 percent, while those from sea-based and land-based workers with contracts of less than a year rose by 2.9 percent. On a cumulative basis, personal remittance for the first seven months of the year reached $15.7 billion, equivalent to a year-on-year growth go 4.6 percent.

Cash remittances from OFs coursed through banks increased by an annualized 0.5 percent to $2.1 billion, bringing the January to July total to $14.2 billion. The January to July total is 4.8 percent higher than the $13.5 billion notched during the same period last year. 

 According to the BSP, the bulk of such funds came from the U.S., the U.A.E., the U.K., Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and Canada. 

 Citing figures from the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), the central bank noted that total job orders reached 526,345, and that 38.7 percent of which has been processed. Most jobs were intended mainly for service, production, and professional, technical and related workers in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Taiwan, and the U.A.E.

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