Marc Mislanghe has been busy compiling memoirs of oldtimer HP types at http://www.hpmemory.org/ New entries include Hank Taylor, Jim Hall, Art Fong, John Minck, and myself -- a small panoply of perspectives from yesteryear. You might say, "WHO CARES?"
The answer could very well be -- "well, it seems like a thousand people a day care" to judge from the Google Analytics. Not bad for an obscure website from a southern Frenchman near Birrritz, France who has been collecting HP instruments and computers for a decade "just 'cuz he loves 'em"
Each of these memoirs offers a glimpse inside a company that valued initiative and innovation at every job, every level of the company. They speak volumes to the idea that "bottoms-up" innovation works, and mostly works better than leadership at the top because, as Packard insisted, "those closest to the problem are the best ones to see a solution to it."
I don't have a favorite in the set, but I will especially mention Taylor's memoir, just because it focuses on innovation in Corporate Infrastructure, rather than products or field sales or marketing -- and such contributions are both harder to see and more systemic -- hence very seldom do they get mentioned. Ray Price and I found so much of this that we devoted a chapter -- "Secret Sauce" -- to it in our book HP Phenomenon. Hank does a first-rate job of describing this in multiple efforts at HP.
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