HP has had more than 1.5 million employees by one count, not to mention the number of suppliers and customers. Sometimes it seems that each one has their own special story about the history, lore, or HP Way that they experienced. Blogs and Wiki's are social networking tools that presumably can help to gather some of these stories, but the organizational difficulty of such tools is still daunting. Our hope here is to post a moderate number of key anecdotes, with the thought that there will be many HP buffs who can elaborate, edit, criticize, contradict, or offer supplemental or enhancing material to make the stories more robust and hopefully more accurate.
So, help us to make the book and succeeding efforts more accurate, more compelling, more enjoyable for those who follow. And our THANKS!
2 comments:
I think that another reason for this blog is for you to inspire current HP employees.
I've been with HP for nearly 10 year and we've been through some difficult time. Reading your brief story of the LaserJet inspired *me* because that's where *I* work. I want to carry on the tradition of great products.
Show me! Tell me about the past. Tell me how former HP greats dealt with the inevitable challenges. Help me regain the faith in HP when its corporate actions erode my ability to trust what I see and here.
Make it to reignite the passion of us HP'ers and make it so that we don't lose perspective of our very great company.
There are tremendous stories in HP history. We shared some of them last night at the "Dave and Lucile" evening for the Los Altos History Museum. Five old-timers (a cumulative 294 years since they began at HP) shared wonderful stories about both Dave and HP. All on video, that hopefully I can get a copy of, and post herein.
The book will include many stories, of course, and surprisingly, a constant theme running thru them is the creativity and contribution at all levels of the company. VERY FREQUENTLY the upper management (including Dave and Bill even) seemed to have feet of clay, when it came to new ideas and products or markets. On the other hand, they commonly allowed good things to happen, driving decisions lower and lower with faith in the individual. This was always variable, depending on the supervisor and group, but it persisted in many places. Based on our interviews, there are many bastions of hope at HP now, just as always. And there are many arenas where people have lost spirit or belief, and are going through the motions. In aggregate, compared to many correlations we have done across other large high-tech firms, HP is still remarkably open to and supportive of contribuution from folk throughout all parts of the company. I hope these anecdotal findings are really true.
Post a Comment