HP shows the way to break a great culture
September 20, 2006Gerald No Comments »
Remember the HP way? It was the style of running a business perfected by David Packard and Bill Hewlett of HP fame. Back in 2004, Business Week’s Peter Burrows reminded his readers of a plaque to be found outside a two-family house at 367 Addison St. in Palo Alto, California. It identifies the dusty one-car garage at the back as the “birthplace of Silicon Valley.” This was where HP first set up shop, in 1938. But it was more than the birthplace of HP. According to Burrows, “it’s the birthplace of a new approach to management, a West Coast alternative to the traditional, hierarchical corporation. Seventy years later, the methods of Hewlett and Packard remain the dominant DNA for tech companies and a major reason for U.S. preeminence in the Information Age.
The two partners developed “an egalitarian, decentralized system that came to be known as ‘the HP Way.’ The essence of the idea, radical at the time, was that employees’ brainpower was the company’s most important resource”. They developed “…one of the first all-company profit-sharing plans… gave shares to all employees… Today, the behavior of the two founders remains a benchmark for business…”.
Sadly, the days of Hewlett and Packard are long gone. Today the company is being rocked by allegations of the company spying on Board members find out who was leaking privileged information to the media. Today the plot thickened when it was reported by the New York Times that “Hewlett-Packard conducted feasibility studies on planting spies in news bureaus of two major publications as part of an investigation of leaks from its board, an individual briefed on the company’s review of the operation said”. How are the mighty fallen.
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