Almost 18 months after leading one of the largest mergers in history, Hewlett-Packard Co. chief executive and York benefactor Carly Fiorina says technology companies are looking for more from their acquisitions than just revenue growth, reported CanWest News Service Oct. 28. Fiorina was in Toronto to deliver the Schulich School of Business annual James Gillies Alumni Lecture, where she announced a $2-million endowment at Schulich to create the Hewlett-Packard Chair in Corporate Responsibility. She said that while the industry faces further consolidation, the basis for those mergers has changed. “I do think there will be continued consolidation, but I think companies are evaluating whether they would simply be buying into a model of the past or are they buying capabilities for the future,” she said. Fiorina’s comments came a year and a half after HP, which is based in Palo Alto, CA, and employs 180,000, acquired Compaq Computer Corp. for approximately US$20 billion.
York building part of what’s right about Toronto
Toronto Life columnist John Lorinc noted in the November issue that the mayoral election has brought with it a large dollop of negativity about the city, and he set out to chart what’s going right. On his list were “post-secondary institutions. Not since the 1960s has there been such a burst of capital investment in Toronto’s universities and community colleges.” Under the provincial government’s SuperBuild program, he noted, “all the schools are filling out their campuses with interesting new facilities – consider York’s energy-efficient computer science and engineering building, completed last year.”