Women Leaders and the Complex Terrain of Transformational Processes
2006 was the year when Brad Garlinghouse wrote what became known as the “Peanut Butter Manifesto”. In this memo, the frustrated Yahoo executive criticized their internal culture for spreading people and resources too thin, “like peanut butter on toast.” At that point in time, the company suffered from lacking focus, being plagued by indecision, and drowning in overlapping initiatives with no strategic cohesion. Garlinghouse’s memo will be soon twenty years old but it has managed to say what all think about the dysfunction taking root in one of the first web giants, and somehow it describes the shenanigans some corporations have, involving not only people and processes, but most of all the kind of corporate politics that erodes trust, agility, the capacity to adapt, culture and meaning.
By 2009, all that mess landed in the lap of Carol Bartz, a seasoned executive with a track record of success at Autodesk. She took the helm as Yahoo’s CEO during one of the most vulnerable moments the company faced, inheriting years of unresolved strategic drift and the skepticism of the public market. She made tough calls and restructured teams, cutting costs, outsourcing search to Microsoft, but the turnaround wasn’t good enough to satisfy the board or Wall Street. Bartz was fired without much explanation in 2011, blamed for failing to perform a miracle on a sinking ship. In many ways, she’d been handed a “glass cliff” assignment, expected to stabilize the foundation which was crumbling, and she was swiftly punished when cracks remained.
Carly Fiorina’s story at Hewlett-Packard happened during another time but has similarities with many of the same themes. Appointed CEO in 1999, she became the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 tech company. Her boldest move was the acquisition of Compaq in 2002, and the board was not happy but in the end that positioned HP for long-term dominance in the PC market. That deal alone doubled revenue, improved supply chain scale, and planted the seeds for HP’s leadership throughout the 2000s. Even after all that, Fiorina’s tenure is often remembered for the cost-cutting and culture clashes that followed. She was fired in 2005 in the middle of internal dissent, just after setting the company up for years of success.
The “glass cliff” became a term researchers later used to describe how women are more likely to be elevated into leadership roles during crises, when the odds of failure are highest. If they succeed, their success is treated as anomalous. If they struggle, it reinforces the perception that they were a risky choice to begin with. What happened to Fiorina and Bertz was not an isolated story: Ginni Rometty at IBM, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo, and several other women in leadership followed similar arcs: brought in during decline, tasked with radical reform, and crucified with an intensity their male peers often escaped.
Back to HP, I remember Mark Hurd and a Standards of Business training I had as a new employee, he spoke of “uncompromising integrity,” but in reality, things were a little bit different. He had aggressive cost-cutting and boosted operational efficiency. Hurd improved margins, but was later fired in 2010 over a personal ethics investigation. Leo Apotheker was the next CEO, he was coming from SAP and didn’t last a year, fired after making strategic decisions that got investors extremely confused and employees thinking “what the hell is going on with this company?”. In the aftermath, HP named Cathie Lesjak, a long-time CFO, and interim CEO to manage the damage and soften the landing of the next leader.
There’s a point to highlight here: the Compaq acquisition more than doubled HP’s workforce overnight, from around 85,000 to 150,000 employees globally. That was a double-sided knife, because roles were overlapped and functions duplicated, meaning that roughly 15,000 to 20,000 jobs were cut in the first years after the merger. In the end, 30,000 job cuts were concentrated in the U.S. under Fiorina’s tenure, while Hurd cut jobs globally, reflecting the company’s growing international presence. More came with Apotheker; a massive restructuring took place not only in the United States but also across Europe and Asia. What’s baffling is that at the same time HP was increasing offshore and nearshore operations, shifting some functions to lower-cost countries, a pattern offsetting layoffs in some regions and shaping HP’s evolving global footprint.
What’s behind Transformation
This article isn’t just about leadership personas or headlines, it’s about the impact with process disciplines and people. That happens especially with GBS transitions in large, global organizations undergoing transformation. During my time at HP between 2007 and 2010, I watched flabbergasted, how digital transformation initiatives, operational restructuring, and Lean Six Sigma (LSS) methodologies reshaped workflows, power dynamics, and most of all, the culture and what employees were supposed to accept as a normal thing.
That transformation comes with different lenses. Take Lean Six Sigma, for example, bringing structure to process flows, identifying inefficiencies, reducing variation, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement. However, over the years, I started to realize that without a people-centered approach, that kind of framework can become something else, rather than tools for empowering the workforce. They can over-regulate and intensify pressure on workers, alienate middle managers, and create unintended consequences, especially in environments where political maneuvering is everywhere. Empowering women in leadership and operational roles emerged as a key differentiator in these transformations, from my own standpoint.
That’s probably because I saw leaders doing more than just checking their metrics or KPIs; some were different because they could cultivate trust, foster collaboration, and champion diversity of thought. Women leaders like Fiorina, Bartz, and later, Ginni Rometty brought perspectives shaped by navigating exclusion and bias, which can translate into greater empathy and inclusive decision-making. That revealed a harsher spotlight when expectations were often double-edged, a strange place where bold decisions were always praised if successful, but treated harshly if outcomes faltered.
From a process standpoint, true transformation requires integrating operational discipline with cultural sensitivity. Operations flow must be designed not only for efficiency but also for resilience, enabling teams to adapt and innovate rather than simply comply with the established new normal. Service environments, whether in IT, customer support, or product delivery, must balance standardization with a human touch, because frankly, automation and digitization can alienate employees and customers if they are not managed carefully.
Discipline in operations should never mean dehumanizing the workforce. Instead, think about creating structures where people feel supported and motivated to deliver their best work. That requires transparent communication, shared goals, and an inclusive culture that empowers all employees, especially those historically marginalized.
Shared Services and Global Operations
By 2007, the Shared Services movement was well underway, having gained significant traction since the late 1990s. The Shared Services & Outsourcing Network (SSON) had already organized six European conferences by that year, establishing a place as a key forum for professionals driving operational efficiency and transformation. At the time, Europe hosted an estimated 1,000 Shared Service Centers (SSCs), with thousands more emerging globally as companies sought to centralize and standardize back-office functions.
These SSCs became critical enablers of the kind of global operational discipline HP and other tech giants required during restructuring and growth phases. Centralizing finance, HR, procurement, and IT operations allowed companies to reduce costs, improve control, and provide consistent service delivery across geographies. However, this also meant navigating the complexity of workforce transitions, cultural integration, and sometimes painful layoffs, with all factors intimately tied to the leadership and process stories told earlier in this article.
Women, Leadership, and Process Transformation
Women’s leadership journeys at HP and other tech giants underscore how organizational structures and cultural mindsets can both enable and constrain. The “glass cliff” is not just a metaphor for risky leadership roles, it signals systemic gaps in how organizations prepare, support, and retain diverse leaders. Processes like Lean Six Sigma, Agile, and Digital Transformation initiatives often focus on "what" and "how" but overlook the "who." Who owns these changes? Who is empowered to lead? Who is protected when challenges arise?
My experience tells me that successful digital and operational transformations thrive when they embed people-centric design, recognizing that behind every process metric is a human story. They flourish where women and underrepresented groups have meaningful voice and agency, not only at the frontline but at the highest levels of decision-making. I couldn’t possibly tell how important it is to have true Diversity and Inclusion in the process of setting up, transforming and scaling up any Enterprise.
Moving past Glass Cliffs
The stories of Carol Bartz, Carly Fiorina, and others serve as cautionary tales but each as a ray of light in the fog. They remind us that leading in the time when messy things are happening is a dangerous task regardless of gender. The difference perhaps is in the ecosystem around leaders, the processes, cultures, and politics that either stop them from doing good change or give them the excuse for doing something questionable. Transformations that marry operational excellence with empathy, that marry discipline with empowerment, can help break the glass cliff into a glass ceiling, and ultimately, a glass horizon, where we can see clearly and leadership opportunities are both equitable and sustainable.