HP research paper

Executive Summary “Nothing is permanent except change.” This famous quote by the great Greek philosopher Heraclitus is so true when define one of the most important characteristics of the business world—the constancy of change. People in business face more challenges and opportunities brought by changes of the market than many other industries. Companies, no matter large or small, have to make internal changes in order to adjust to the external environment. Hewlett-Packard Company (HP), a large and remarkable information technology corporation, like all other businesses, has been changing throughout its existing and has been fighting for the goal of establishing a sustainable market year by year. Based on the interest of working at HP after graduation, plenty of researches are done in terms of HP’s history, strategic changes and culture. This research paper report mainly aims to analyze the changes made by Carleton S. Fiorina (Picture on the right), HP’s chief executive officer (CEO) who was appointed while HP was facing a decelerate growth in 1999. Fiorina met the expectation to bring the company a fairly new image. However, Fiorina’s executive strategies did not work well for the company, as a result she failed to reinvigorate HP as she once promised. This report mainly has three parts: a brief introduction about HP and Fiorina, the analysis about how did Fiorina’s leadership and strategic changes turned out to be failures during her tenure, and further suggestions for HP.

2. Introduction
2.1 A Brief History of HP Hewlett-Packard Company was founded by two Stanford University graduators Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in 1939 in Palo Alto, California with an initial capital investment of US$538. The company started with providing small electric devices and its first financially successful product was the audio oscillator. Then it continuously introduced computers, the world first scientific calculator and various series of computing products to the