Carly Fiorina
Virginia 250 Honorary Chair
Carly Fiorina began her career as a secretary for a nine-person real estate firm. She climbed the corporate ladder at AT&T and Lucent Technologies through a willingness to tackle tough problems, a relentless focus on producing results and accepting accountability, and a passion for leveraging the talents of others and building high-performance teams.
She was recruited to Hewlett-Packard with a mission to transform the company from a laggard to a leader, becoming the first woman to lead a Fortune 50 company. During her tenure as Chair and CEO, Hewlett-Packard became the largest technology company in the world, innovation tripled, cash flow quadrupled, and revenue and profit growth accelerated.
Both government and the private sector have sought out her vast problem-solving, team-building, and leadership experience. She has advised the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department, and the Department of Homeland Security. She founded Carly Fiorina Enterprises to bring her expertise to private sector teams, and the Unlocking Potential Foundation to allow those in the social sector to benefit from her experience. She is the author of three best-selling books on leadership for general audiences, as well as a weekly LinkedIn newsletter with over 500,000 subscribers. She is a frequent speaker to teams and executives of many industries all over the world.
Carly believes that citizens and leaders in civil society have an important role and an enormous opportunity to drive positive change. In 2015, Carly launched a campaign for President. Americans came to know Carly as a clear-eyed, direct leader capable of actually solving problems and delivering results.
She is a member of the newly-formed American Bar Association Task Force for American Democracy, which is focused on those actions necessary to improve citizens’ confidence in American elections. She serves as the founding visionary and Executive Chair of The Williamsburg Institute, where history-makers meet. She also serves on the Board of Visitors for James Madison University.
As a student of history and philosophy at Stanford University, Carly first began to appreciate the power of ideas to drive change and the impact of history on the present and future. She believes that a deeper understanding of our nation’s full history, as well as the ideas upon which America was founded is particularly important during the current climate of division, discord, and political dysfunction. She serves as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation as well as the National Honorary Chair of the Virginia 250 Commission. In both roles, she is focused on ensuring that our nation’s founding is broadly understood, accurately portrayed, and commemorated in an inclusive, accessible way, particularly as we approach the United States Semiquincentennial in 2026.
Developed and honed throughout her experience over decades and around the globe, from the bottom of the ladder to the very top, from the private to the public to the social sector, Carly approaches each challenge with three core beliefs: every individual has more potential than they realize; people closest to the problem know best how to solve it; and the highest calling of leadership is to unlock potential in others and work with them to solve problems and change things for the better. Putting those beliefs to work within the criminal justice system, she is the founder and Chair of Pathway to Promise, an organization that works with justice-involved youth so they can change their world.
She and her husband Frank have been married for almost forty years. They live in Lorton, Virginia, where they are both active members of the community and support numerous local charitable causes. Their daughter, son-in-law and two granddaughters live nearby.