Carly Fiorina was a terrible CEO at Hewlett Packard, Donald Trump alleges, who saw the share price crash. There is important context to this, which is that the shares of all tech companies crashed at the same time. Her supporters claim that HP held up rather better than its peers. She doubled the company’s revenues, she responds. Context here is that she merged HP with Compaq, so she is comparing the revenues of HP with the later revenues of HP-Compaq.
Trump, she responds, led his father’s business to four bankruptcies. He shrugs. He never broke the law and has never been personally bankrupt. The first is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s defense: it may have been, technically, legal, but it doesn’t mean it is a qualification for the presidency. And the fact that he has never, personally, been declared bankrupt, indeed has become very rich while making deals in which investors never got paid, is also something that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
Your columnist does not feel equipped to reach a definitive conclusion on the business success of either – at least at this point. Both have experienced ups and downs in their fortunes, as has business as a whole. Your columnist is certainly not claiming that he could have done better, if he had inherited Trump’s empire or become CEO of HP. Indeed, if he had started in business as a receptionist, as Fiorina did, it is certain he would never have risen to be CEO of HP in the first place.
But let us take it as a given that both have had some remarkable successes and some significant setbacks. Both have, almost certainly, made some major misjudgments. Most of us never get to make multi-billion dollar mistakes because we never get to make multi-billion dollar decisions. It is not just in business that people get to back such mistakes. Presidential candidates Jindal, Huckabee, Christie, Walker, Gilmore, Kasich, Pataki and Bush have been state chief executives, All will defend their records as ferociously as Trump and Fiorina do. All will cherry-pick statistics, in the manner of Fiorina’s doubled revenues, in ways that exaggerate their merits and minimize their failings.
Common Sense would rather see a candidate acknowledge error – particularly a major, multi-billion dollar error – and say “yep, with hindsight that was clearly a bad call. But let me tell you what I have learned from my mistakes, large and small, and how that learning will make me a better executive and a better leader . . .”.
Acknowledging error is an important part of growing as a person, but politics and the media are very unforgiving. In his reelection debate, George W Bush struggled to name a mistake from his first term as president. (As an aside, he could easily, and harmlessly, have acknowledged that his initial decision to set up Homeland Security as an agency, not a cabinet level department, was an error, since he had already reversed it by then).
The merciless punishment of any such acknowledgement as “weakness”, when it is actually a considerable strength, is damaging to the political process.
We should welcome a candidate who is willing to discuss openly what he – or she – has learnt from the mistakes which have littered every human being’s past.
Quentin Langley is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire Business School as well as a freelance columnist published in the UK and all parts of the US. He blogs on social media and crisis communications at brandjacknews.com
Filed under: U.S. Politics
