At one point the roof was about to fall in and there was a crisis meeting. A celebrated playwright on the board dismissed the apologetic finance director’s pleas for raising more money with a sweeping hand: “I don’t care if we perform in a shed, as long as we don’t give in to Mammon.”Not giving in to Mammon no longer washes. The past 10 years have seen a courting of business sponsorship on an unprecedented scale as well as good old-fashioned corporate hospitality Not that this is always welcomed. While football clubs fall over themselves to encourage corporate hospitality, the arts seem often to “put up with it”. When the new Covent Garden was created it was decided there would be no drinking in the boxes, one music man said it would do the company chairmen good to go and fight in the public bar with the rest of us. Imagine if I spoke about my clients like that.Sadly, this is symptomatic of a more general misunderstanding that borders on hostility.There was a party after a gallery opening last week and I was being chatted up by one of the “artists of today”.

We discussed bleeding heads and Russian mazes and all was going swimmingly well until I was asked that question, “what do YOU do?” One mention of the c word – the City – and I was out for the count The look was a mixture of hostility and boredom. Why is it that in some arts circles saying you work in the City is a bit like saying you are an undertaker?It’s time for the creatives and the bean counters to get a bit closer. Thanks to increased business sponsorship and the very considerable National Lottery funding, more money than ever is flowing in to the arts. This money must be well spent, and spent in a way that appeals to consumers.This doesn’t mean dumbing down. Contrast the Dome’s failed attempt to replicate Disneyworld with the unashamedly high-brow and astonishingly successful Tate Modern gallery – that will be this millennium’s monument..

For a ground-breaking technological invention which promises to revolutionise the computer industry and decimate competitors as mighty as IBM and Sun Microsystems, the launch of HP’s new 9000 SuperDome was not exactly prepossessing. For a ground-breaking technological invention which promises to revolutionise the computer industry and decimate competitors as mighty as IBM and Sun Microsystems, the launch of HP’s new 9000 SuperDome was not exactly prepossessing.
On Tuesday, when the new server received its first public airing, the 400 or so journalists gathered expectantly in Wall Street’s Regent Hotel were greeted by a pathetic puff of smoke, which subsided to reveal a large box resembling nothing if not a rather capacious fridge-freezer. Still, it wouldn’t be the first dome, super or otherwise, to fail to live up to its hype.The respective websites of IBM and Sun treated SuperDome’s unveiling with lofty disdain – deigning not even to mention it – but don’t be fooled. Scott McNealy, Sun’s chief executive, who unwinds by winding up colleagues on the ice-hockey rink, and Lou Gerstner, the Wall Street bruiser who kicked IBM back into shape, are worried men.Not that they would admit it, but the main reason may be that HP’s assault on the macho men of the computer hardware industry is being masterminded by a diminutive woman who has presided over the feminisation of Hewlett-Packard, as HP used to be known before the formidable Carly Fiorina got her manicured hands on it.Ms Fiorina, who took charge of HP a year ago, is loath to discuss her gender She has preferred to concentrate on the job in hand. As well as developing a new server said to be twice as fast as its nearest rival, this also involves negotiating a likely $18bn (£12.8bn) acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ consultancy arm – a deal that would allow HP to complement its technical services with the kind of advisory function that has served rivals such as IBM and Cisco so well.It seems that Ms Fiorina just does not have the time to do the “America’s foremost businesswoman” stuff. Perhaps she is also sensitive to the feelings of her number two, Ann Livermore, who herself had coveted a position vacated by the retirement of former chief executive Lew Platt. Or possibly in deference to Carolyn Ticknor, who completes a triumvirate of women at the top of the corporation famously established by two electrical engineering students in a Californian garage.Male chauvinists might say that if HP started life in the driveway, its big decisions are now made in the kitchen.

However, Ms Fiorina, while in no mood to celebrate the shattering of the glass ceiling, is only too willing to confirm that HP is no longer the company she inherited.”The SuperDome project has become somewhat legendary inside the company because of the way it was reinventing HP,” she says “It was about bringing together the full power of HP. Today we are raising the bar of what it means to be a player in this industry.”"Reinventing” is one of the buzzwords uttered habitually by Ms Fiorina and her nodding lieutenants – and with some justification. Hewlett-Packard, whose eponymous founders developed a $105bn company on the shoulders of their powers of invention, was founded at the outbreak of the Second World War, but appeared to be on its last legs by the end of the century.”We were talking about 243 consecutive profitable quarters,” says Phil Lawler, managing director of HP’s UK arm “We had never had a crisis. As it wasn’t falling apart, the temptation was often just to tinker, not to change.”To be fair, Mr Platt had set the “reinvented” HP in train with the demerger of Agilent Technologies, which separated off many of its original operations. In the process, he ostracised a conservative lobby, which might have opposed the changes brought about by Ms Fiorina, the outsider he decided was needed to drag HP into the 21st century.Her background – in telecommunications, first with AT&T and then Lucent – provided the perfect perspective to reposition a company that had become preoccupied with its products at the expense of its customers.Ms Livermore says: “HP has had 61 years as an engineering company, and it took a bit of time to shake up the view that we were just an engineering company.