Carly Fiorina’s HP legacy looms over her 2016 ambitions

“HP requires executive decision-making and the presidency is all about executive decision-making,” Fiorina said.

But for many of her former HP colleagues, President Carly Fiorina is a disturbing idea.

READ: With eye on a presidential bid, Carly Fiorina hires Republican Party spokeswoman

Interviews with close to a dozen current and former HP employees reveal that nearly 10 years after being forced out of the firm, Fiorina remains a deeply polarizing figure. Her tenure, which coincided with the bursting of the dot-com bubble, was fraught with layoffs, leadership transitions and a controversial merger with Compaq that pitted Fiorina against members of the Hewlett and Packard families in an ugly public feud.

Now, Fiorina’s public flirtation with a presidential campaign is reopening those old wounds and inviting new scrutiny of her management skills, which she is selling as one of her top assets.

Jason Burnett, the grandson of the late HP co-founder David Packard and a member of the board of trustees at the Packard Foundation, once HP’s largest shareholder, said in an interview that Fiorina shouldn’t work at any level of government.

Plenty of HP alums are hesitant to revisit this tumultuous period. Five senior HP executives who worked with Fiorina — including multiple former division VPs — declined to be interviewed about her tenure.

Fiorina’s supporters

But ask Fiorina’s supporters, and they insist HP badly needed a fresh boost of energy as it struggled to stay relevant during the boom of the information technology sector. Fiorina’s critics, they say, fail to appreciate her bold vision for transforming HP into a 21st century company.

“Contrary to what has been written in terms of a lot of negative things, she did what she was hired to do and that was to lead a transformation,” said Bob Knowling, who was on HP’s board of directors during Fiorina’s tenure. “Transformation is not easy work. It’s hard work, and I think she did a stellar job.”

Others say her critics are clinging to the past in a way that diminishes her real accomplishments.

“CEOs aren’t there to have coffee in the cafeteria with employees and to yuk it up,” said Bill Mutell, a former senior executive at HP. “It’s easy for the gallery to criticize when in fact I’d be curious to see how they would have done things differently.”

CNN