Booking Carly

I'm shocked, shocked to learn that Carly Fiorina is writing a book. Penguins are hot. First the movie, now Carly's tell-all (Fiorina's inked a deal with Penguin to write her memoirs.) So in a year or so we'll be regaled with "now it can be told" tales from the inner sanctum sanctorum of the house that Bill and Dave built. Jeeze, it's taken her this long? File this in the Stuff I've Never Been Able to Understand bin, which grows heftier by the week, but Al Ries and I are in violent agreement on this one. Namely, the Fiorina Marketing Mystique. Marketing? Ries, the legendary marketing uber dude, whose common-sense treatises remain the gold standard, said it best in a piece in Ad Age (March 07, 2005). Listen up:

A slick marketer (Carly Fiorina) ? A high-powered marketing whiz? A sales whiz known for high-profile marketing events? I've written 11 books on marketing and spent more than 50 years in the marketing field, and I don't agree with anything Carly Fiorina has done involving marketing strategy at Hewlett-Packard.

"Synergies," according to Carly, would eventually make H-P a leader in all of its businesses. What marketing expert runs around the country talking about synergies? Only CEOs and investment bankers do that.

A slick marketer? My tastes run more toward Sidney Frank, who at the age of 77 launched Grey Goose vodka and seven years later sold the brand to Bacardi Ltd. for more than $2 billion. Or John Schnatter, who in his early 20s started selling pizza after tearing out a broom closet to put a pie oven in a bar co-owned by his father in Jeffersonville, Ind. Ten years later, the company went public as Papa John’s Pizza.

Or Gary Heavin, who sold his first Curves franchise in 1995 and now has a franchised chain with 8,000 locations and more than $1 billion in annual revenues. Could've been a good CEO With her enthusiasm, energy and drive, Carla Fiorina might have made a fine CEO of Hewlett-Packard ... if she had a marketing expert behind her whispering strategies in her ear.

To paraphrase Strother Martin in the movie "Cool Hand Luke', what she had there was a problem not of communication, but concentration. Spelled F-O-C-U-S. Not in the sense of being unable to focus her own mind, but to focus her company strategy. In my Lessons Learned in Silicon Valley, #8 is observed more in the breach than the observance.

"Never forget to keep your main thing the main thing."

The cautionary tale for breaking this commandment? Fiorina. Name Hewlett-Packard's main thing during her tenure. You can't because there were several. Several dozen. And it's another instance of how inside-out thinking can hurt you. There is ONE THING that you – your product and company – do better than anyone else. Not three, not five, not ten. No matter what the Kool-Aid drinking, inside-out people want to believe. You need to pinpoint precisely that which you do better than any of your competitors. This is your main thing. Then you need to keep it front and center…the centerpiece of everything you do. Don’t dilute it. Don’t mess with it. And above all, prohibit add-ons.