I was just watching Carly Fiorina

on Charley Rose. I think she's sexy. I was raised by and around strong women, and she's got it all: looks, knowledge (it shows), strength and, frankly, money (and it shows that she came by it through her own effort).



I wonder if she could use a butler.

Do you need more reason to love her than this:

CARLY FIORINA, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, HEWLETT-PACKARD

"The art of war," by the ancient Chinese general Sun Tzu, is a favorite book of Carly Fiorina's.

Perhaps with good reason. Few have faced the challenges Ms. Fiorina has since Hewlett-Packard Co. in 1999 made her its first chief executive to be chosen from outside the company. Her appointment sent a thunderbolt through H-P and through the corporate world, where ascensions of female executives to top jobs were still relatively rare.

Five years later, the shock waves are still coming as Ms. Fiorina struggles to fulfill both the promise of her own career and the ambitious goals she set for her company, now a tech behemoth after its bitterly contested $19 billion acquisition of Compaq Computer Corp. in 2002.

Once installed at H-P, Ms. Fiorina immediately introduced a plan to centralize its dispersed corporate structure, cutting down its 83 business units to just a handful. And she quickly proclaimed that H-P would deliver growth of 12 percent to 15 percent a year. But by late 2000, she found herself steering the company through one of the roughest periods in high-tech history.

This article includes this (to me) tantalizing tidbit, "She attended Stanford University, graduating with a degree in medieval history."

Oh, baby...

I was working for HP as a contractor when she was chosen, and my first thought was that she was a "token woman" to assuage the political correctness that was even more rampant in 1999 than it is now, but she has proven to be far more than that. I wish her well.

I think she can do it.