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More on Bill and Dave
May 28, 2008
In my January 11 posting, "
Tell your Bill and Dave Stories," I asked if the HP Way still exists and if so, where. Several people resopnoded, though some contected me directly. One such person is John Minck, a longtime HP/Agilent employee who wrote
Inside HP: A Narrative History of Hewlett-Packard from 1939–1990 and was quoted in the book
Bill & Dave, which I reviewed. Minck's comments were so extensive thay they're worthy of their own posting. John's words appear below (with his permission).
You will recall my name from a reference you made to my HP Narrative history in your recent column asking for comments about the legendary HP Way. I retired in 1995, and don't pay a whole lot of attention to the trade magazines these days, although I did keep up partially because I continued to edit and publish the NCSLI Newsletter, which is the global trade association for metrology and quality. I am sure you are familiar with it. After 29 years, I finally resigned that job last October. I find that I really miss that community of technical folks.
Anyway, where has the HP Way gone? It certainly attenuated once Dave and Bill themselves got out of active management. But I think some of the seeds were sown back when the stock ownership tilted to Wall Street. You know that in the early years, Bill and Dave and all the top management of HP held the majority of stock. But then, new issues and one of the great benefits of HP vision was the stock purchase plans and options, which began to ultimately put more of the stock into public ownership. I haven't bothered to look this up, but I'd estimate that the non-HP personnel ownership of the stock went lower than 50% about the 1980s. That caused a slow trend to look to quarterly or at first annual financial results, rather than true long term thinking on management's part.
We never ignored profit because Packard set that as the number one objective, saying that in one single factor, you found the accumulated results of how good a job you did with product strategy, sales strategy, production processes, you name it. I personally think John Young did a fine job of continuing the HP Way, taking the company from around $1.3 billion a year to about $14 billion in the face of some of the most complex computer technology and strategy decisions you can imagine. By the way, Chuck House and Ray Price are just finishing a new book about HP, which will deal a lot with the internal processes of product strategies and how HP was set up organizationally to handle that as well as they did. Lew Platt, also an internal HP guy held onto the culture fairly well, although by that time, the organization was huge, problems were supremely complex, etc.
Spinning off Agilent always seemed to me to be a strange decision. General Electric is a stellar company with 400 product divisions--I think they call them departments--with diverse products from bathroom silicone to locomotives, and does just fine. A $8 billion dollar measurement business in a $80 billion computer, more or less, shouldn't have been so hard to handle. I had hired Ned Barnholt and he was a fine choice for Agilent CEO, but he stepped into a situation no one foresaw. He took along a business that was back to the wall in orders, fiber comms and wireless was going gangbusters, I heard that backlogs were 6 months, and they took along all the people they could manage and were hiring to catch up. But almost immediately the dot.com bust smashed the growth, gave them thousands too many people, order cancellations, kind of like the semiconductor business. Although Agilent presumably assumed the HP Way mantle and culture, the trauma and morale loss involved in laying off--I forgot--10,000 people was never gained back.
The computer, printer, and calculator parts of HP were NEVER real HP Way sorts of organizations. Partly because we hired so many computer folks from the outside. Part of the genius of Dave and Bill was that all through those great decades, we hired MOSTLY new engineers right out of college, and grew managers from within. I'd guess 98%. It made a difference to grow up there in a desk within hearing distance of your boss on his telephone--no personal offices there, no cubicles, and to hear how they transacted their job. When you brought in ex-IBM and Control Data and other folks, their culture was distinctly different. You could IMPOSE the HP Way, by sending Paul Ely to be their group manager, but it often didn't stick.
Most everything was different than instruments, consumer selling for the hand calculators, big deal selling for the HP 3000 mid sized computers, dramatic differences for the printer business. All successful for revenues but not the old HP.
Then came Carly. Personality based management. I was long gone, having left in 1995, but the stories I heard from old friends in the ranks, agree with most of the bad stuff written about her. Mark Hurd has helped a lot, but the internal morale and culture is probably much like some of the other commentary you have received on your website. And it is hard to argue with the ringing success of HP in revenues, products and business.
Agilent is pretty successful too, having divested their semiconductor parts and some of their measurement parts. Their culture is better, but also drifted away from the HP Way. The camaraderie is gone, from my observation, not entirely, because there are still a few remnants of oldtimers around. Including Bill Sullivan who grew from within.
Well, Martin, that is way more than you wanted to know. To us REAL oldtimers, neither HP or Agilent have the HP culture anymore, but considering the globalization of everything, and the pace of business these days, they are still better than most.
Posted by Martin Rowe on May 28, 2008 | Comments (0)
