HP Exec: I Ran with the Big Boys

From pitching deals in a strip club to stuffing her pants with socks, Carly Fiorina has shown that she can hold her own in the male-dominated world of business.

Fiorina, who served as chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard before her controversial firing in 2005 and is rumored to have political aspirations, came to the Kennedy School of Government (KSG) yesterday to speak about her new book, “Tough Choices: A Memoir.”

Fiorina, the first female CEO of a Fortune 20 company, was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine in every year from 1998 through 2003.

However, Fiorina criticized this list of powerful women in business yesterday, comparing it to separate rankings for male and female tennis players that suggest that “women can’t play in the same league as the big boys.”

Fiorina herself has made a point of showing that she can play with the big boys throughout her career.

She told a story about making a presentation before a “very macho” all-male sales team.

Fiorina knew she would have to prove to them that she and her team, which was half female, were tough enough.

To accomplish this, Fiorina walked on the stage with her husband’s athletic socks stuffed in her pants and announced that she and her team had “balls as big as anybody’s.”

Fiorina says she was not always attracted to a career in business. She graduated from Stanford with a degree in medieval history and philosophy in 1976 before enrolling in law school at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She did not find law to be her calling, however, and soon dropped out and took a job as an office secretary at a commercial real estate firm.

It was there, when some members of the firm “decided to take a chance” on her and offered her additional responsibilities, that Fiorina decided she might want to go into business. After a period of self-exploration which included teaching English in Italy, Fiorina enrolled in the MBA program at the University of Maryland, earning an MBA in 1980.

While rising through sales at AT&T, Fiorina encountered challenges as a woman in the workforce. She spoke about how before her first sales pitch, her co-worker suggested that she might not want to come along because the meeting was to be held at a local strip club.

Although she felt “humiliated” during the event, she said that afterwords, “I felt a confidence that I hadn’t before.”

Regarding her controversial dismissal from Hewlett-Packard in 2005, Fiorina explained that in the end, she was “at peace” with her decision to “stay true to her values and tell the truth” instead of saving face and letting the board of directors that fired her portray her dismissal as her choice and a result of a desire to move on.