War & Peace Quote by Carly Fiorina

Fiorina is calling out a familiar media trick: turning corporate governance into a morality play. By framing the HP-Compaq merger and the dissent of Walter Hewlett and David Packard as "a fight between the past and the future", she suggests the press is doing narrative work that conveniently flatters one side. "Most of the media" is a strategic broad brush, the kind executives use to delegitimize criticism without litigating every claim. It is less a complaint than a preemptive reframe: if you oppose the deal, you are not prudently skeptical; you are nostalgic.

The subtext is power. Hewlett and Packard carry founder legitimacy, a kind of inherited authority that can make any CEO look like a temporary tenant. Fiorina's line tries to move the argument off sacred ground (heritage, culture, the "HP Way") and onto a runway (scale, survival, competition). She wants the merger to read as inevitability, not choice, because inevitability is the one thing shareholders can't meaningfully vote against.

The context matters: early-2000s tech was wobbling post-dot-com, PCs were commoditizing, and "consolidate or die" felt like a plausible business theology. Fiorina leverages that anxiety. "Recent actions" is diplomatically vague, reducing high-profile opposition to mere maneuvering, while "past and future" turns a boardroom fight into a generational shift. It's rhetoric designed to make doubt feel like denial, and resistance feel like regression.