Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey by Fiorina, Carly(May 5, 2015) Hardcover by Carly Fiorina

Author:Carly Fiorina [Fiorina, Carly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B015QKWXXK
Publisher: Sentinel
Published: 1702-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

A Cautionary Tale

THERE IS A DAY AFTER THE SENATE RACE THAT stands out in my mind. We had come to Virginia for Christmas as we usually did. It was a bright, beautiful December day. Kara, Morgan, and I were in Georgetown. We were Christmas shopping. I remember crossing the street, hand in hand with my girls. It was warm and sunny, and we were having fun. I remember thinking to myself: this is a good life. I had no sense of regret, only great blessings. It was a moment of grace.

In a life full of ebbs and flows, it was a time of clarity and transition. Life was flowing. Frank and I missed being with Tracy, Lowell, Kara, and Morgan. We began to think of moving back home to Virginia, where we had first met, married, and bought our first home. I love looking at houses, so I went on the Internet. I found a wonderful house on the banks of the Potomac in Mason Neck, Virginia—close to George Mason’s home, Gunston Hall, and about ten miles south of George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon. We drove out to see it and instantly fell in love, although we couldn’t come to terms with the seller. We had lots of time, so we spent the first part of 2011 in California. There was no need to rush. We finally closed on the house in early summer, and by October we had moved back home to Virginia.

Leaving California was very difficult for me. California was where I spent most of my childhood. It was the place where my father had been a judge. It is the state whose beauty and character my mother had captured on canvas. I had gone to college there and led an iconic Golden State company. California is in my veins and always will be.

California is also a cautionary tale for America. Theodore Roosevelt once said that California is “west of the West.” What he meant was that California was America at its youngest and most full of potential—the land of opportunity in a nation of opportunity. That was the California in which Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard created the largest technology company in the world from the garage behind Dave Packard’s house. That same alchemy of wide-open opportunity, brains, and grit that gave birth to Hewlett-Packard also produced Intel, Apple, Google, eBay, and thousands of other great companies.

The California of HP and Google is still with us; fortunes can still be made and the future shaped in Silicon Valley. What has changed—drastically—is the California of the middle and working classes. That was the California of Ronald Reagan, a place where schoolteachers and policemen and aerospace workers with families could afford to own a home and a yard. The public schools worked. The weather kept energy bills low. And the same income and education that would only cover a rented apartment back East could get a house in a quiet neighborhood. In California.

And so they came: the middle class, the destitute, visionaries seeking their fortunes, and exiles seeking a home.

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