Leadership and management are not the same: Carly Fiorina

Leadership and management are fundamentally different, according to Carly Fiorina, serial chair and board director, and former Hewlett Packard CEO.

Carly Fiorina, World Business Forum, ICC Sydney

Fiorina spoke at the World Business Forum in Sydney this morning and told audiences that while some managers can be leaders, and some leaders can be managers, the two are not one and the same.

“A leader purposefully, deliberately, systematically changes the order of things for the better and solves problems. That is the essence of leadership,” she explained.

“Leadership in that sense is very different from management. Management is important, but management is producing acceptable results, perhaps excellent results within known constraints and conditions.”

She told the crowd of business leaders at the International Convention Centre that when she joined Hewlett Packard in 1999, the organisation had been "managing" for eight years.

“Change never happens without the catalyst of leadership,” she said.

While Fiorina was HP’s first female CEO, she was also the first non-engineer CEO, which made her an "outsider" to the business.

“I didn't come from the HP culture. I knew I couldn't just walk in and say, ‘Well, here's what's wrong. Here's what we have to do differently’. We had to have a shared perspective, a candid and realistic clear-eyed perspective of where we are.

"We had to understand our current state and that is where positive change always starts. A clear-eyed, realistic understanding of our current state,” she said.

After three days of the senior leadership team going over the company’s assets, it became clear that even with over $200 million a year being poured into R&D, the organisation was slipping behind the global tech leaders, not even making it into the top 25 innovators in the world.

In order to genuinely transform, HP needed more than incremental improvement she said.

“Incremental improvement is always possible with effective management. But incremental improvement is frequently not good enough,” said Fiorina.

“We established for ourselves an ambitious goal, among others, that said, ‘We want to be among the top five innovators in the world,’ because in technology if you are not leading and innovating then you are lagging and falling behind. By the time I left, we were generating 14 patents a day. We started out at less than two.”

Fiorina was emphatic about the importance of measurement when it comes to driving successful organisational change.

“Measuring things injects a rigour into the change process that is absolutely essential to ensuring that change actually occurs,” said Fiorina.

“Sustainable change in a deliberate direction towards strategic goals requires constant measuring. And one of the reasons constant measurement is so important is so that people understand whether progress is being made.”