Carly Fiorina (person)

Cara Carleton (Carly) Fiorina is about to get more than her well deserved "15 minutes of fame." She is the Chairman and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, who has captured the technology news recently with the proposed merger with PC maker, Compaq.

Born on September 6, 1954, her mother was a painter and her father, a law professor. The family moved often and Carly attended five different high schools. She earned her BA in Medieval History and Philosophy at Stanford in 1976 and then went to the UCLA Law School obviously hoping to follow her father's lead, but it didn't take her long to discover, she hated law. So off she went to the University of Maryland to earn an MBA in Marketing in 1980. She later added a Master of Science degree in Business from MIT.

Prior to joining HP in July of 1999, Carly spent 20 years in the sales and marketing arenas with, first AT&T and then Lucent Technologies. At AT&T, Carly began her career as an account director and in a relatively short time (10 years), became the first female officer at 35 and was soon in charge of North American Operations. With Lucent, Carly was responsible for many advances including their spinoff from AT&T and their first public offering. And now with HP, she's at the helm of the recently announced merger with Compaq, a move that at the moment, isn't setting well with investors and has the usual critics up in arms. But neither HP nor Carly are new at innovations, and as Carly stated early on, "Clearly we need to reinvigorate things here (at HP)." The invigoration has begun. It'll be interesting to see where Carly goes from here.