SURFACE MOUNT TECHNOLOGY

It's a forty-year old story, but the moral of the story is timeless.

I had moved into a co-ordination role for HP in 1982, called Director of Corporate Engineering.  You could define that narrowly as Director of a small group labeled "Corporate Engineering" which was in fact true.   You could alternatively define it broadly as Director of Engineering for the Corporation, which at times for various topics was also true.  Topics like control of worldwide Capital Equipment budgets for all 91 R&D centers, or design standards for such topics as co-ordinated Human Factors when new icons and varied meanings proliferated when CRT displays displaced analog meters and digital Nixie-tubes.   I found, for example, that there were something like 23 variations of HP Basic from like 17 divisions--which made a mockery of the HP Computer Group's broad claim of inter-activity for a synchronized Manufacturing floor.   We reduced it to 2 dialects, but could never get it to one--so the Fort Collins desktop computers and workstations never 'joined the party' for the Cupertino-based CPU networks.  And things like building a truly-networked corporation for the 15,000 design engineers--which we did,

One thing we were always on the lookout for was innovation in a single division, that might be helpful for other divisions if they simply knew about it.   So, how do you tell them?  To that end, we had a Corporate Engineering newsletter, called HP Network, surprise, and we built a leading-edge electronic network that we called HP Internet circa 1985.   I later got a couple of big awards for catalyzing that network, which at the time was cited  as the 2nd largest corporate network in the world (HP' was like the 60th largest company in the US, so hardly to be expected, right?). 

The citation was in Jessica Lipnack's and Jeffrey Stamps' book, The Networking Book, November 1986.  I'd met them and worked with them at the innovative mid-life crisis school, Western Behavioral Science Institute in La Jolla, CA from 1982-1984.  

https://www.amazon.com/Networking-Book-People-Connecting/dp/0710209762

They would go on to write the earliest and best books on Virtual Teams, and multiple Networking discoveries--some while teaming with the NJIT folk who had built EIES, the Electronic Information Exchange System that WBSI used for its innovative post-graduate college program.  More about EIES and its leaders, Murray Turoff and Rozanne Hiltz, are here:

https://computing.njit.edu/news/njit-research-1970s-became-vital-parts-todays-social-media-recipe

So, I got a head-start on interconnecting folk from these activities.  SME (Society for Manufacturing Engineers), a group I'd never been part of, gave me their 1986 Award for "International Contributions for Engineering and Scientific Communities Award:

Some years later, Smithsonian and MIT selected a set of 200 "Wizards and their Wonders" and this international network was key to my selection (being ACM President didn't hurt either).

Okay, so on with the story.  As the Corporate Engineering Director, my job, among other things, was to visit each of the 91 divisional R&D (mostly D) labs and 25 research groups in HP Labs once a year.  When Dave Packard outlined that expectation to me, I whistled--"whew, that's a lot of travel.  What do I say to them?  I'll be so busy traveling that I won't have time for much else."  

His laconic answer: " Just tell them what you learned at the last place you visited."

Well, first of all, I did indeed do a lot of travel.  I didn't make every spot every year, but probably more like every 18 months or so--became an easy "million-miler" for United Airlines among others.  "Join the Navy, see the world" and "IBM = I've Been Moved" were two mottos I could now appreciate better.

But, the fateful day in McMinnville, Oregon, at a tiny acquisition (Femcor) with maybe 70 employees basically 'off-the-radar' in the Medical Group, I was shown superb NEW technology called Surface Mount Technology.  Wikipedia informs: Surface-mount technology, originally called planar mounting, is a method in which the electrical components are mounted directly onto the surface of a printed circuit board. An electrical component mounted in this manner is referred to as a surface-mount device.  

I liked it.  And it was nowhere else in the HP pantheon, so I couldn't wait to describe it in our newsletter, which we did in the next issue.  (I cannot find a copy today, but might when I tackle the stacks of boxes in the garage).   

Recall what Femcor did: "Medical, industrial and portable X-ray systems, field emission X-ray and electron beam tubes, pulsed X-ray and electron beam systems, cardiac resuscitation systems."  Not exactly the center-weight for an increasingly computer-systems oriented corporation, for which Femcor accounted for less than two-tenths of one percent of HP revenues.

And soon enough, I got an from the general manager at Femcor, mad as hell.   It seems he had been inundated with calls and visitors from around the HP loop.   He said, with some vehemence and invective that I cannot repeat verbatim, something like: "we've had four times as many visitors as we have employees.  The first two were great, and then it got bothersome, and now we cannot get a damn thing done because of your damn article.  CALL OFF THE DOGS."

I'd had a somewhat similar experience with an Analytical division in Karlsruhe, Germany, which made liquid chromatographs with great 3D pictures that I extolled for better informational content.  But Karlsruhe was 55 miles east of Böblingen, where HP's German efforts were concentrated.  The nearest town was Baden-Baden, known for its thermal baths--impressively remote for most potential HP visitors.  And 3D images were much less in vogue than potential packaging technology for computers.

So I didn't get much push-back from the Karlsruhe team, but the lesson stuck from the Femcor folk.

The lesson: Not everyone appreciates shining a bright light on them--notoriety is not necessarily good.