Is the HP Way still relevant today? | Hacker News Reader

Is the HP Way still relevant today?

theengineeringmanager.com

83 pointsjstanier32 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I think it goes hand in hand. Employees who are proud of their company will do their best to make outstanding products, or provide excellent services.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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...

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.

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/

Section 3++ - Didn't read.

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.

It was a reflection inspired by the day we had together as a company. I wouldn't say it's an advert, but I do like working there.

Out of curiousity, why would that category make you think it is an advertisement?

I currently bucket my posts into "management 101" informational articles and then everything else currently lands under "growth". I could probably do with making some more categories now there are a whole bunch of articles on the site.

Then I was wrong.

Your blog post reminded me of a style of writing. Reciting something with the intent to make it look cool, then show how it applies to your company. The 'Growth' category made me wonder if you were doing that. But I see, it's a pleasant reflection.

No problem - I appreciate you pointing it out, as it can help me improve my writing style (and categorization of posts!)

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

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

If a company employs tens of thousands of proven engineers and can’t think of a single useful thing for them to work on then that is absolutely 100% an utter, abject failure of management.

No idea how the Swiss Micro calculators don't end up getting sued.

I suspect because there's no-one left at HP who even remembers their legacy. Or those few that do are happy to see it live on.

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.

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