Carly Fiorina

Carly Fiorina Speaking Topics

• From Secretary to CEO: A Transformative Story of Leadership

  Solving problems, effectively empowering employees, and driving results are the expectations of today’s leaders, at all levels and in every sector.

  In a powerful, pragmatic presentation, Carly shares her transformative career story: from secretary for a nine-person real estate business, to becoming the first woman to lead a FORTUNE 50 company, as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.

  She delivers reflections and lessons learned from a journey on which she solved the problems in front of her and unlocked the potential of those around her.

  Based on her own renowned experiences, and with an innate ability to help others reach their highest leadership potential, Carly imparts how leaders can be clear-eyed about their current state, optimistic about their future, and deliberate about getting the results they want.

• Building a High-Performance Culture: Lessons from a High-Profile Assignment

  As CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Carly Fiorina successfully tackled complicated business challenges – strategic focus, product innovation, and mergers and integration – all during the dot.com boom and bust and the worst technology recession in 25 years.

  The company’s success can be attributed to Carly’s invaluable foresight: for HP to survive, she had to transform its complacent culture into a dynamic, innovative environment that would enable the company to become the industry leader.

  From her renowned leadership of HP, Carly shares her personal account of what it takes to create a high-performance culture. She openly discusses navigating a challenging path filled with hurdles like major acquisition, integration, and transformational change.

  For today’s organizations that are forced to adjust in an incessantly volatile business environment, she provides a blueprint for navigating uncertainty, managing change, and building a high-performance culture – all critical keys to empowering and driving results.

Unlocking Potential: Leaders Exist Everywhere

Throughout her career, Carly Fiorina has developed leaders and problem solvers in nearly every sector, from for-profits and non-profits, to faith-based communities and academia.

She believes that leadership is not about an impressive title or possessing the corner office, but about effectively solving problems and unlocking the potential of those around you.

Productive members of today’s workforce are increasingly interested in professional growth and development through their surrounding communities, and companies in every industry must provide the tools and resources to meet these very practical needs and foster tomorrow’s leaders.

Based on her work leading the Unlocking Potential Foundation, Carly delivers a powerful presentation that inspires, empowers, and connects employees at every level.

She shares her proven leadership philosophy, which is based on a set of human behaviors and characteristics that everyone can develop and deploy, as well as a set of practical tools that enable effective problem-solving.

Diversity in Today's Workplace: More than a Nice-to-Have; It's a Must-Have

Today, more than ever, a successful workplace must be comprised of teams with innovative, diverse perspectives who are empowered to solve their sector’s most challenging problems.

Ethnically diverse organizations are 35% more likely to outperform their peers, and companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 15% more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians. But, traditional diversity training is unlikely to foster such a productive environment.

Carly Fiorina shattered the glass ceiling by cultivating diverse teams, from top to bottom. She achieved success and solved the critical problems directly ahead of her only by surrounding herself with a myriad of perspectives and empowering her diverse teams to drive real change.

Carly’s commanding presentation on diversity is built on her direct experience and personal knowledge that, to grow, learn, and solve tough problems, you must invite new perspectives to the table.

Diversity is absolutely a must-have for your bottom line, and you have to role model that belief for your team: you must hold yourself and your team to a higher standard, and you must be challenged.

Learning from Out Past: Linking History to Today

History can and should be strategically leveraged to help us navigate today’s extremely turbulent times. Instead, too often, we romanticize history, confusing nostalgia for the real thing. Or, we compartmentalize the past and focus only on those aspects that serve a particular rhetorical or political purpose. Sometimes, we even place historic figures on a lofty pedestal that renders them both un-human and un-real, and we cannot expect to emulate what is out of reach.

But, when we combine knowledge and experience about what works in the real world with the principles and ideals upon which our country was founded, then change is possible. This interplay between practicality and ideals is America’s story; practicality and idealism are our gifts to the world.

It’s imperative that we distill practical, real-world fundamentals from our founding ideals of the past, and apply to our present.

With her deep understanding of history, Carly Fiorina offers an insightful assessment of how to, and what we can learn from, our past. She connects historic events and figures to the current complex issues confronting both our nation and the world.