Carly Fiorina

When the struggling Hewlett-Packard needed a chief executive to right the ship, the board turned to Carly Fiorina, the first woman to head a Fortune 50 company. 

A graduate of Stanford, University of Maryland and MIT, Fiorina got her start in the business and technology worlds at AT&T, where she worked her way up to oversee its North American operations. She continued to rise through the ranks of spinoff Lucent until July 1999, when she joined the computer maker HP.

Fiorina pushed through a controversial merger with Compaq, a move that made HP the world’s largest seller of personal computers.

She was ultimately forced out of the company in 2005, in the midst of another downturn.

The saga has become a prime example of a concept known as “the glass cliff,” in which dysfunctional or struggling companies hire women or minorities to take over the top job as a signal that they are taking on a bold new direction, but then blame the leaders when they fail to work the company out of its troubles. 

Fiorina jumped into politics, advising the late Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) 2008 presidential campaign and mounting her own bid for president eight years later.

— Niv Elis