A Narrative History of Hewlett-packard From 1939–1990
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1 INSIDE HP: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF HEWLETT-PACKARD FROM 1939 –1990 by John Minck Introduction I started writing some parts of t his back in the early 1980‘s, because I felt that it might be useful for new employees of HP (and later Agilent) to know more about the early culture of ―our‖ company. During my 37 years with HP , I had always felt very privileged to have been offered employment here i n 1957. Immodestly, this narrative contains a lot of personal experiences and even some non-HP stories of my li fe and times, although my Life and Times life narrative is another long document. When you finish reading all of this you may think I should have sub-titled it ―Hewlett-Packard and Me.‖ Leading up to the 1980‘s, the company had reached some growth years when we hired thousands of new employees each year, with perhaps hundreds of them as engineers and field sales people. As I gave orientation l ectures to new employees in our Stanford Park Division, on ho w our customers used our equipment, or to neophyte field sales engineers from all over the world, I found a tremendous interest in the company‘s past history. I often led auto trips down to Dave and Bill‘s first garage on Addison Avenue, in downtown Palo Alto. By the 1980‘s, Hewlett-Packard had become a business phenomenon. The company's external success and its internal workings had caught the fancy of the nation‘s business press, as well as the popular Bay Area press. Management texts and conferences began to contain frequent references to HP's organizational and business strategies and tactics. Tom P eter's 1982 book, "In Search of Excellence," gave high marks to HP for our ability to organize and to innovate, both in products and our work culture. All of us who worked at HP in those years had become very proud of this recognition. It was a great ego-booster, to belong to a winning team, and HP was a winner, in products and profits and performance. But, in 1985, HP was a lot more than a successful multi- national corporation, with over 82,000 people, hundreds, perhaps thousands of buildings, and more than 1000 acres of floor space unde r roof. It was the place wher e we employees spent about a third of our waking hours. And next to our family and friends, HP was often the most important thing in our lives. For some, it may actually have been THE most important thing. I recall a late evening in the early 1960‘s, I was working on some midnight project, in Bldg 5U, and using the copying machine, when I ran into Carl Anderson. At that time, Carl was managing some corporate promotion and catalog functions. ―Go home, Carl!‖ I said, and he answered, ―I am home; once in a while, I go to my house.‖ (When I retired in 1995, I remember explaining to my friends that I was feeling pretty-much adrift--not having any hobbies to fall back on — since, in a real sense, ―I am what I do.‖) That's the whole point to this monograph. The HP Company culture, down at the people level, has been mentioned positively in most of the flattering articles about us. The management philosophy coined by Bill Hewlett or Dave Packard, "The HP Way," has been described and analyzed a lot over the years. Those many i ndustry authors would analyze our processes and organizational details of how we worked with each other in a spirit of openness and cooperation. My memories are rich and full. I've visited hundreds of customer plants in my 37 years with HP, and have probably talked with a thousand customers in their workplaces as well as at trade shows and conferences. In those disc ussions, a lot comes out about the working cult ures in those other companies. What I found was that t here are almost no workplaces that matched HP in overall friendliness and spirit and personal relationships. I could walk down t o the desk of a lab engineer, and ask for a half hour of microwave tutorial to help solve a customer problem. There would be no hesitation, nor would they worry about someone stealing credit for something they created. There were many companies I visited, where engineers held everything technical very close to their office, since there were so many cases where others would steal their clever ideas as their own. But, in the 199 0‘s, that very style of openness (and of course, the business acumen) that had created our successes threatened to bury us in a continuing growth that might have overwhelmed the personal "feel" of the company we o nce were. By the time of the spinoff of the Agilent product line, HP had become a giant, powerful, and imposing corporation. For the tens of thousands of new employees who have joined HP and Agilent in the recent years, from a worldwide diversity of cultures, I felt that this story about some of the early HP personalities would be interesting, as well as perhaps useful. By meeting some of these engaging personalities, we could see that the present HP/Agilent business culture has its roots in a long line of HP employees. Like any shared human endeavor, these early characters are diverse and interesting. All the human strengths and weaknesses are there, but there is a good-nature to them. They get along. They work as a team. They have fun working together. There is no caution or distrust in dealing with each other. With the spinoff of Agilent Technologies, of the Test and Measurement, Health and Chemical sectors in 1999, we hoped that most of the early HP culture would transfer to the new entity. But surely, as the HP corporation continues to branch further into computer, PC and Internet cultures, some sense of its HP Way roots will remain, just as do some thousands of senior employees who have stayed with the computer part of HP. Even as the Compaq merger consolidation goes forward, the HP Way will metamorphose, to guide the company that Bill and Dave founded. I believe
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