Carly Fiorina

(This is an extract from September's Taking The Lead, the monthly email newsletter I write for Leaders in London, published today).

Carly Fiorina led the merger of HP and Compaq before being given the order of the golden boot, but has since had her reputation re-built by results: Thanks to her HP strategy, Hewlett-Packard overtook IBM last year as the world’s largest technology company. Tom Peters, the business guru and a past Leaders in London speaker, now refers to her as his "CEO Hero". Fiorina likes to quote Lao Tsu: