
Is the HP Way still relevant today? - jstanier
http://theengineeringmanager.com/growth/is-the-hp-way-still-relevant-today/
======
heisenbit
Culture eats strategy for breakfast (unknown author but often attributed to
Drucker).

Boards often ignore this wisdom and install people based on their previous job
elsewhere, long term inside knowledge in a different role or whatever. When
the leader of the company is not standing behind the values and defending them
the company starts drifting. People become cynical about what unites them and
that uniting includes management up to the CEO - or now divides them. In these
cases official company values imho. can even become liability as everyone is
constantly reminded of double-speak from the top.

Reading "The HP Way" is a reminder on how much business is about people and
the society - often forgotten these days.

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throwawayhp
As someone who worked in the HP company during the Carly, Mark, Leo and Meg
eras, I’ve heard some old timers say much better things about the company.

Even when I started, The HP Way was known and alive at least in some pockets
of the company. It was what inspired many to give our best despite the
changing environment.

After Carly, things only got worse with Mark Hurd. Cutting costs was the one
and only trick he knew.

Now the company remains a tiny piece of its former self, having been split and
sold to others in pieces.

Any company that looks up to and wants to emulate The HP Way would be good to
be employed in.

~~~
cmiles74
I worked at HP in the mid nineties and left right when Carly took over.
Working at HP was the first real job I ever had (real in that I didn't need
other jobs and had health insurance, etc.) The people that I worked with were,
for the most part, pretty serious about the company. When I decided to leave
there was shock all around. It was the first and only time that co-workers
approached me and said things like "Working here is really a career, it's not
just another job. You should really think about staying." When I started, most
of the people I worked with had been there at least five years and most more
then ten. Several had been there their entire careers, starting off in entry-
level positions and arcing up into management, then kind of descending into a
holding pattern in my department (UX and MPE/iX platform support and
management) until retirement.

But even then things were changing. By the time I left I had five managers to
whom I directly reported. One of those managers was fired, as far as I could
tell, because he didn't agree with the other four; sadly they were the one
that made the most sense to me. Certainly that wasn't the HP way. There was
suspicion among almost everyone about Carly Fiorina, not so much because she
was a women, but because she didn't rise from the HP ranks and likely would be
unfamiliar with the "HP way". Even at that late date, the "HP way" was
something people talked about even if it was fading away.

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TimJYoung
I think something else is missing here, though. HP had _great_ products, so I
don't think that you can necessarily do the "HP Way" in a company where the
products that the company makes (or their services) are not seen as valuable
and/or worthwhile by the employees.

~~~
3rdAccount
The HP calculator story pops up here occasionally. They bet huge on it and it
paid off hugely. Every scientist and engineer threw away their slide-rule and
bought one for a large chunk of change. The design is still iconic.

~~~
kps
Marketing had initially estimated the HP-35 would sell 10,000 units. When
25,000 had been sold, _the bug_ was discovered: _2.02_ _ln_ _eˣ_ returned _2_.

Packard's response: “We're going to tell everyone and offer them a
replacement. It would be better to never make a dime of profit than to have a
product out there with a problem.”

They sold 300,000 in the 3 years that model was available.

“It would be better to never make a dime of profit than to have a product out
there with a problem” is the _reason_ they made a profit.

------
nine_k
The article links to the HP corporate culture booklet from 1980 written
apparently by Hewlett. It's worth reading.

Can't fail to notice how successful a _well-engineered_ company culture might
be. The booklet gives pretty rational reasons for things like profit-sharing,
stock sharing, company-sponsored medical insurance, management by objective
and lack of micro-management, etc, all introduced by HP very early.

~~~
sokoloff
Reading the HP Way PDF, I was struck that several authors bothered to call out
that HP used first/personal names to address fellow employees.

I can't imagine NOT doing so, but obviously ~40 years ago, that was uncommon
enough to be noteworthy.

[0] -
[http://www.hpalumni.org/HPWayBooklet1980.pdf](http://www.hpalumni.org/HPWayBooklet1980.pdf)

~~~
maxxxxx
They did that even in Germany when I visited there in the 90s. I had never
seen this before.

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kps
Both parts are relevant and recurring.

A small company starts and through unconventional business culture — treating
employees better than average, and putting quality over short-term profit —
grows exponentially. Then they bring in MBAs to turn things around.

In HP the second phase didn't occur until H & P retired, but SV today likes to
move fast and wreck things.

------
Animats
Strange article. The author's company does _advertising analytics_. The HP Way
was for a company that worked on hard problems and insisted on quality
products.

I was once told by an HP employee, pre-collapse, that they did not use the
term "bug" internally. They use the term "defect". One does not ship products
with defects.

~~~
jstanier
Not my company: a company I work for. I don't own it!

Are you implying that companies that don't work on "hard" problems can't be
guided by meaningful values?

Also, quite a lot of the things we work on are actually quite tricky, from a
computer science point of view...

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Klover
I read the blogpost and I was wondering what I was missing. Then I looked to
the left of the page, and saw it was categorized as 'Growth'. So this is like
a little advertisement for Brandwatch?

I'm sorry if I got it all wrong, James.

~~~
schemathings
Two sections before 'The HP Way' in an engineering blog.

Section 1 - Linting (sounds like engineering, interested, continue)...

Section 2 - Management (3 paragraphs ending with maligning the President's
management style, not interested, tired of it, 41.7% chance of annoying your
audience) [https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-
ratings/](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/)

Section 3++ - Didn't read.

~~~
jstanier
And that's OK. I don't expect everyone to like what I write. We're all
different. There's an audience outside of America too. I don't live there.

------
formerhp
You know what? I worked at this company like recently and I bet the job
wouldn't have been really stupid if this was still a thing

------
gaius
Considerably more relevant than what is left of HP-the-company. Every time I
use my trusty HP-12C I feel a little sad for what was lost in the slash-and-
burn era of Fiorina. Swiss Micros keeping the dream alive!

~~~
cmiles74
It's easy to blame Carly Fiorina for HP's decline, she was leading the company
during the downturn of the 2000s. That said, I don't think it's entirely fair:
that was a tough time all around! Many companies went belly-up during the dot-
com bust[0], like MCI Worldcom, Gateway, etc.

Looking back, it seems like her decision to double-down on computing hardware
(servers, desktops, laptops, printers, etc.) and Intel technology (at the
expense of their own, like the tech from Apollo or DEC/Compaq's Alpha)
immediately before the dot-com bust were the really disastrous decisions.

It's almost like she didn't know the dot-com bust was right around the corner!
:-P

~~~
pinewurst
I agree with this:

Carly was a terrible leader but she, in a sense, was selected for her known
personality by a system that had already gone off the cliff. A number of books
came out around that time about the HP board and its internal/external
conflicts.

I had a job for a while watching the current HP for technological and business
developments and it was like being a gawker at a side show.

~~~
gaius
_Carly was a terrible leader_

That's putting it mildly. In terms of both jobs and shareholder value
destroyed, she has a decent shot at the title of "Worst CEO Ever", of any
company.

~~~
pinewurst
No doubts about her solipsistic incompetence. :)

Just as devil's advocate, was she that much worse than the other Dear Leaders
of her corporate generation? Mark Hurd, Meg Whitman, Ginni Rometty? Heck, even
the older but monstrously odious Jack Welch can fit in this cauldron.

The idea of something like the HP Way is anathema to such people.

~~~
gaius
_was she that much worse than the other Dear Leaders of her corporate
generation? Mark Hurd, Meg Whitman, Ginni Rometty?_

Elizabeth Holmes has set the bar to a new low, but Fiorina is right down there
with Welch. So much destruction and for what? How many years have those people
set the world back?

------
remote_phone
The HP way died with Carly Fiorina. Her audacity for thinking she could be a
viable candidate for presidency after gutting one of the hallowed institutions
of Silicon Valley made me very livid every time I saw her on the screen. I
hate Trump and think he’s ruining our country but Fiorina would have been
worse.

