transformational leadership

Abstract

There has been an explosion of interest in leadership. Each day stories appear in the newspapers discussing instances of successful leadership, as well as signifi cant failures of leadership. The stories usually concern world class and national politicians and statesmen, chief executive offi cers (CEO) of business and industry, directors of government and health care agencies, or generals and admirals. Sometimes the stories are of high-level leaders who are often in the spotlight. Carly Fiorina was the CEO of Hewlett Packard (HP) from 1999 until ousted in early 2005. As one of only a handful of women CEOs of Fortune 100 companies, she was often in the news, but no more so than when she led HP through the choppy waters of its merger with Compaq. Through a contentious fi ght to win over the support of HP’s board of directors, Fiorina kept her eyes on the vision of transforming HP into a “full service” technology company to rival IBM (Lashinsky, 2002). To make this a reality, Fiorina had to fi rst persuade board mem bers and inspire rank and fi le employees to buy in to her vision: Indeed, the day after the merger, she and Michael Capellas, the CEO of Compaq—now the No. 2 at HP—spent two hours simply marching through the one-mile-plus walkway that connects Compaq’s 17-building corporate headquarters in Houston, meeting and greeting as many people as they could. “She was like this massive fi gure,” recalls HP employee Antonio Humphreys, who worked for Compaq before the merger. “She took pictures and put on hats. The fact that she was willing to do that for the common folk—that earned her a lot of points.” (Lashinsky, 2002, p. 94) CEO Fiorina immediately focused on implementing the vision by empowering subordinates and providing an example of the hard work needed to transform an organization, its culture, and its trajectory.