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Tavis: Carly Fiorina served as president and CEO of computer giant Hewlett-Packard from 1999 to 2005. During her tenure, she was perhaps the most high profile female executive in the entire country. Before HP, she spent nearly 20 years at AT&T and Lucent Technologies. She is out this fall with a memoir about her successful career, called 'Tough Choices.' Carly Fiorina, nice to have you on the program.

Carly Fiorina: Nice to be with you, Tavis.

Tavis: Let me read just two sentences from the very beginning of this text, and I should have marked it. The prologue. I'll read from the prologue. 'In the end, the board did not have the courage to face me. They did not thank me, and they did not say goodbye. They did not explain their decision or their reasoning; they did not seek my opinion or my involvement in any aspect of the transition.' Bitter?

Fiorina: No, but it's factual. I wanted to write an authentic book, and I knew I had to deal with my firing authentically. And I dealt with it right up front, so people wouldn't rush to the back of the book to see if I'd talk about it. (Laugh)

Tavis: What do you most think - you've written a whole book about it - but what do you most think when you think back on what that kind of firing meant? And in your case, a very high profile, public firing?

Fiorina: Yeah. Well first of all, the whole book isn't about it, although obviously, to write a memoir about my career, I have to include it. So what I think is that the board became dysfunctional. Groups of people become dysfunctional when they can't talk about the real issues plainly up on the table, and when their personal agendas overwhelm their public responsibilities. Sometimes, groups get overcome by emotion, and kind of drive off a cliff. And I think that's what happened here.

Tavis: This merger that in part precedes this firing, the merger, of course, that we all know about, HP and Compaq, was something that you pushed through, although there was a great deal of opposition to it. And I've often wondered why it is, and I'm curious to get your take on this, why it is that - and I understand that leadership means leading. It doesn't mean following, it means leading, I understand that. On the other hand, what's the point of pushing something through when there's so much opposition to it to begin with?

Fiorina: Yeah. Well, first of all, a leader's job is frequently to see things before everybody sees them, so that you can react in time. But the decision to merge with Compaq was a unanimous decision of the board. In fact, every decision during my tenure was unanimous, except my ouster. (Laugh) And we had gone through a nine-month, deliberative process. We looked at every alternative, we looked at every risk.

So it was clearly the right thing to do. But the market was going through a technology recession. We announced it the week before September 11. There were corporate scandals everywhere. It was a very difficult time to try and explain the merger. And then, of course, we had opposition from the family. Nevertheless, despite all the controversy, it was the right thing to do. We had set down a path, and we had to finish it.

And of course now, all the same people who said it was a terrible idea have acknowledged that it turns out to have been a very good idea, and provided the foundation for the leadership that the company is currently experiencing.

Tavis: Take me inside of a boardroom. What happens inside of a company, and you intimated this earlier, in answer to my first question. But what happens when a board makes a unanimous decision and months, sometimes a couple years down the road, it turns upside down? The board, to your point, made a unanimous decision to pursue this, and then all hell breaks loose and nobody wants to face, nobody wants to talk about it, etcetera, etcetera. What happens in that kind of setting?

Fiorina: Well first I should say that the merger had nothing to do with my firing. But I guess what I would say is the merger was a sound decision. It was executed soundly, and everyone supported the merger. In the boardroom, and ultimately outside in the company. I started out as a secretary. And I really thought, when I was a secretary in the mailroom, that the guys in the boardroom were different than the guys in the mailroom.

Turns out they're not. People are people wherever you find them. And so people - it's human nature that some people get overcome by their personal agendas or their personal rivalries, and some people can rise above them. And the dynamics that people are familiar with going on in any setting, those same dynamics can go on in a boardroom, as well. That's partially why I wrote the book. (Laugh)

Tavis: Talk to me about what it meant then for you to be - I intimated earlier that you were, at the time, perhaps the most powerful woman in corporate America. What did that mean, good or bad?

Fiorina: Well, well, at one level, of course, it's an honor, but I told 'Fortune' magazine the very first time they did this series, 'The Most Powerful Women in Business,' I said, 'If you wanna highlight women, good. But don't number us one to 50. Because if you number us one to 50, you imply that business is like tennis. There's a women's ladder and a men's ladder, and the women have to compete against each other one to 50, 'cause we're not good enough to play with the boys.'

Business should be a game where everybody gets to play. And business is a better game when everybody gets to play. So, I have very mixed feelings about the label and the list and the number.

Tavis: What kind of obstacles, though, did you end up facing? Have you had to face, because of the gender question, though? Your point notwithstanding.

Fiorina: So one of the things that I write about in this book are experiences that happened to me when I was coming up. My first meeting with important clients as a brand-new salesperson at AT&T was in a strip club. I was introduced by my boss as our token bimbo. The reality is that business is still not gender blind or color blind. Have we come a long way?

Yes. Have we got a long way to go? You bet. And women still have a different experience, where they're caricatured differently, they're described differently, they're perceived differently. That's reality. On the other hand, I started out as a secretary. Most of the people who took a chance on me were men, because they had the authority to do so. And so I see reasons for optimism, as well. And I talk about both things that give me optimism in business, and things that I think realistically still remain problems.

Tavis: This question requires you to set the modesty aside for just a second here. So many people start out in the mailroom. So many people start out as secretaries. And most of us, of course, don't end up the CEO of major companies. Aside from your talent, is there a particular thing that you think helped you rise?

Fiorina: Well, it's interesting. I never had a plan to become a CEO. And every job I had, including being a secretary, I worked really hard at and I did the best job I could, and I didn't think about the next job. But when opportunity knocked, I wasn't afraid to answer the door. I've taken a lot of risks in my career, and I do think that hard work makes a huge difference, but I think you gotta take some risks to move up, as well.

Tavis: In the book, you talk about how you, not unlike a lot of people, including yours truly, wanted to do things to please their parents. And there's an epiphany that you share in the book when you realize that that wasn't the kind of life you wanted to live. Share it for me.

Fiorina: Well, I had gone off to law school 'cause that's what my dad wanted me to do, and I was a goody two-shoes, parent-pleasing kid. That's what I was. And about a semester into law school, actually right here at UCLA, I realized I hated it. And so for me, it was this huge, tough choice, my first adult choice, to displease my parents. But I realized that pleasing my parents was not a sustainable life goal.

And I also realized that if I didn't have passion for something, then I wasn't gonna be able to do it well. And that was an important life lesson for me, that it couldn't just be about working my brain. It had to be about my heart, too.

Tavis: Speaking of your heart, what do you most rely on, have you most relied on, in terms of figuring out how to make tough choices?

Fiorina: So first I think the quality of the decision-making process is really important. A quality decision-making process puts everything up on the table. All the disagreements, all the risks, all the facts that contradict where you think you're going. In other words, you really have to exercise that decision-making process. So I rely a lot on have I seen the whole picture here?

But once I've done that, do I have all the advice, all the input, all the risks, all the downsides, all the facts that point me in a different direction? Then, as you know, you have to sit down with yourself and say, 'Okay, what do I really believe? Do I believe I'm doing the right things for the right reasons in the right ways to the best of my ability?' And if you can say that, and if you can rely on the decision-making process you've used, then you gotta make the tough choice and be prepared to live with the consequences.

Tavis: One would argue, one could argue, as I will now, that that becomes increasingly difficult to do in a corporate setting. That it's increasingly difficult to do what Carly or said CEO or said employee thinks is right, juxtaposed against what the shareholders want. How do you navigate that?

Fiorina: Well, I think it is difficult, and I think it's a shame to me that when corporate scandals erupt, that people start talking immediately about what rules should have been in place, or what rules need to be put in place. And we don't talk enough about values, ethics. What's right, what's wrong. But on the other hand, it is a leader's job to set the tone at the top.

And if the leader doesn't set the right tone in terms of ethics and values, that can be incredibly corrosive in an organization. And it's also a leader's job, despite all the pressures from Wall Street, it is a leader's job to think about years, not quarters. That's why we did the Compaq merger. I told our board the stock would drop 20 percent the day we announced that deal. It dropped 23 percent, I was close. But it was the right thing to do. Because we were thinking about years, not quarters.

Tavis: Is corporate America run amok, or are the stories that we see about corporate mendacity too much hype? Overrated?

Fiorina: No, I don't think they're overrated. Neither do I think they're necessarily typical. But I think sunlight is the best disinfectant. (Laugh) It's always good to have openness and transparency for everything, including the things that go wrong, so that people can have the conversations about ethics and values.

Tavis: The book by Carly Fiorina is called 'Tough Choices.' It is a memoir, and as she mentioned at the top of the conversation, it is about much more than what we have read about what happened when she left HP. It is a story about a very successful career in the world of business. 'Tough Choices' by Carly Fiorina. Carly, nice to have you on the program.

Fiorina: Nice (unintelligible).

Tavis: It's my pleasure. That's our show for tonight. Catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles, thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.