Carly Fiorina, chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard

NEWS Carleton (Carly) Fiorina became chairman and CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1999 and has been the driving force behind the strongly opposed merger with Compaq. She holds a BA in medieval history and philosophy from Stanford University, an MBA from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MSc from MIT. Fiorina spent 20 years at AT&T and Lucent Technologies and was closely involved with the spin off of the latter from the former. While at Lucent she also served as president of its Global Service Provider business. At HP, she coined the catchphrase 'just invent'. She is also a non executive board member of Cisco.