Fiorina urges companies to combat the digital divide

HP CEO Carly Fiorina is urging businesses to seek a diverse workforce and to help train under-served communities to use technology.

"Somebody who you help to help themselves today may very well be your partner, your customer, or your very best employee tomorrow," she told the audience on Wednesday at the 2003 Digital Connections Conference in San Jose. The event was organised by Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr.'s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition to bring business leaders together to tackle the digital divide - the gulf between those who use the internet and those who don't.

Fiorina said only 10 per cent of the world's population can afford a computer, and getting everybody else wired presents a business opportunity.

She said HP's digital divide initiatives have already helped to wire communities such as East Palo Alto (a poor neighbourhood in the middle of Silicon Valley). The efforts have generated business and jobs, she said, by providing people with access to technology. "It's not about talent, it's not about lack of ambition," she said. "The talent is there, the ambition is there. It's about opportunity."

Fiorina, one of the highest-ranking women in the tech industry, told the audience that Jackson had called her to offer encouragement during her heated, and eventually successful, battle for HP to buy Compaq over the objections of some members of the company founders' families.

"It suddenly made me realise how big this battle really was," she said. "I got off the phone and said, 'Oh my god, I've just been praying with the Reverend Jesse Jackson.'"

Four years ago, at the height of the technology boom, Jackson raised the ire of some Silicon Valley leaders when he told them they hadn't done enough to attract minorities. Now, the civil rights leader and former presidential candidate is in town to rally a group that's been disproportionately affected by the layoffs that have slammed dot-com workers. The unemployment rate hovers at around 12 per cent for African-Americans and at around seven per cent for Hispanics in the Silicon Valley.

Jackson told the conference crowd to think big, to draw inspiration from minority chief executives speaking at the conference and to network like crazy. "So many people have the capacity to jump through all the right hoops, but they just don't have the access," he said.

Also speaking at the conference was Symantec chief executive John W. Thompson, whom Jackson compared with Jackie Robinson, the first African American baseball player in the major leagues.

Thompson made headlines in 1999, when he took the helm at the security software maker just two days after Jackson had lambasted Silicon Valley's lack of diversity. During his speech, Thompson said that back then, he couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. He said he told an editor at the time, "Why don't you show up in two or three years? It will be the story of our success, not the story of our arrival."

Four years later, Thompson told the crowd Symantec is growing despite the downturn. It projects growth of nine to 10 per cent this year and plans to hire 1,500 people in 2003. "The fact that (Silicon) Valley is at a low point doesn't suggest there aren't opportunities," he said.

Thompson said biotechnology, network management, and industry-specific customer relationship and enterprise management software represent some of the biggest openings in the tech industry.

"There are opportunities for smart, young entrepreneurs," he told the crowd, noting that his company recently bought a start-up headed by a Hispanic for $135m, about £86m.

Chuck Smith, chief executive of telecommunications company SBC West, urged the crowd to look for mentors and to mentor others. "As lucrative as my business is and as successful as SBC is, it doesn't matter, if there are people who have been left behind," he said. "We can make a difference with a little bit of creativity. When you go back to work tomorrow, remember how you got there."

Lisa M. Bowman writes for News.com