On Topic: That pesky adjective

For a number of years, I had a quote from Carly Fiorina pinned on the wall alongside my desk. I've since misplaced that piece of paper, but it said, essentially, don't allow others to convince you they know more about your business than you do.

In a world that for the past four years has been buffeted by economic uncertainty and technological ground-shifting, Fiorina's statement can be a solid touchstone. We're smarter than others may think we are, to paraphrase Christopher Robin.

Before her highly publicized fall - well, more of a push - from Hewlett-Packard in 2005, Fiorina was the only woman CEO at a company in the Dow Jones industrial average. To my reckoning, that takes a remarkable accumulation of skills.

Here's what I mean: A few weeks back, veteran business writer George C. Ford and I were discussing stories for this edition's theme. George expressed the concern that maybe we shouldn't be writing about women business leaders as a separate topic at all.

Women and men should be treated identically in our coverage, he suggested - as professionals.

He's right, of course. We certainly don't report business-news stories about men business leaders differently than stories about women business leaders.

That adjective would imply something other than what we intend.

Except we know - and more than one women who runs a steel plant, a construction business, an economic-development agency, a real estate company, a PR firm, a newspaper has confirmed to me in no uncertain terms - that it's not always the same for both genders.

In her autobiography, “Tough Choices” (Penguin Group, 2006), Fiorina points out that as she rose through the ranks of corporate America, other officers - by which we mean men - treated her differently. And not necessarily for the better.

At one meeting at AT&T Co., not long after she was named vice president of strategy and marketing, she was asked her views on a particular director:

Although I'd said virtually the same things as the others, the reaction to me was different. Now the director's boss said, “Well, Carly, you just don't like him. You're being emotional, not objective.”

He was trying to dismiss me with the old women-are-too-emotional line. Later, after I'd been promoted to senior vice president, a peer angrily accused me of sleeping with the boss to get my way; he'd vigorously argued against one of my recommendations, and I'd prevailed.

Keep in mind this exchange didn't occur way back in the unenlightened 1950s or '60s, but in the 1990s.

Fiorina carried on, guided by her own lights, and that served her well.

In 1998, Fortune magazine proclaimed her the most powerful woman in business, and in 2004 she was among Time magazine's “Time 100.” That same year, she came up No. 10 on Forbes's “World's 100 Most Powerful Women.”

The glass ceiling, for Fiorina, had become permeable.

Fiorina recalls in her book that she was flattered by the inclusions. She points out that such lists can “encourage other women to enter the business world … and can serve to remind everyone that diversity makes business better.”

But, she adds, such a listing “implies that business is like tennis or golf or soccer - there's the women's ladder or team, and the men's. Women have to compete against one another because they can't compete with men.”

She notes that, after all, there is no “50 Most Powerful Men in Business” list.

“Tough Choices” is packed with heaps of sound management advice, based on the author's real-life experiences - and on subjects other than gender bias.

She relates how at HP she took charge of an executive team that “had never been asked to lead before,” how a business model doesn't have “synergy” just because headquarters says it does, and how a board of directors sometimes needs a good shot of “realism.”

That last notion was her thinking in 2001, as HP moved toward its eventual purchase of Compaq:

Our board needed to understand how tough this (integration) would be really be. … No one was focused on consolidation as the obvious next step in an industry that would never again grow at five time GDP.

Fiorina's prediction of hard times ahead was spot on. The Compaq deal was controversial from start to finish, and one of the Hewlett family members put up a rousing battle.

In the end, had the stock soared, all that scuffling would have been forgotten and Fiorina hailed as a bold and savvy leader.

But it didn't, and she wasn't. The board tossed her out.

She went on in 2010 to run against Barbara Boxer of California for the U.S. Senate. (Fiorina's primary campaign featured “demon sheep” that “fleeced” taxpayers. That motif was turned against her in YouTube parodies - “Carly has been very, very ba-a-a-d.”)

But in the book's summing-up, Fiorina claims no regrets.

“I had made mistakes,” she writes, “but I had made a difference. … While I grieved for the people and the purpose I had lost, I did not grieve for the loss of my soul.”

Maintaining your soul - your sense of worth and self-esteem, your balance - is a good goal for any leader, woman or man, right?