Every "once in a while" something unexpected shows up in my 'in-box' that causes a lump in my throat. Here is a blogpost by an Irish 'influencer' named Aidan McCullen whom I've mentioned before (mostly since he did some six hours of interviewing me a few months back. Here's his recent salvo, with a 'sad' HP appended story: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7458857628308463616/
“The Early Bird May Catch the Worm, but the Second Mouse Gets the Cheese” — The Second Mouse (presumably)
This is a comforting story behind the Fast Follower strategy.
There's a fine line between being a strategic second mouse and being a latecomer eating leftovers.
In the 1960s, Chuck House was working on a large-screen display at HP. Dave Packard himself told him to abandon it. Chuck ignored the order. He could see something in the market that HP's own rules had no way of describing, and he kept going. That display became the monitor used for the Apollo moon landing and a $35M business. Chuck later wrote a book about the experience and called it Permission Denied.
Innovation often asks you to break "the syntax" of the company to honour "the context" of the market.
Big organisations fall in love with syntax.
Syntax is the rules, the SOPs, "the way we do things." Syntax scales beautifully, but also stops most companies from spotting the trap before it snaps. The people closest to the context, the Chuck Houses of the world, usually know first. The question is whether the org will let them act on it.
That's the theme of some recent conversations on the show.
Jonathan Brill and Stephen Wunker talked about their new book, AI and the Octopus Organization.
40 years after Chuck House, Jonathan was HP's Global Futurist and Research Director when, in 2009, he sat down with an HP executive to flag a critical touchscreen component coming through one of his clients. The reception was, in his words, "subdued". The strategy was to wait for Apple to launch the iPad, then fast-follow.
So, HP then waited for Microsoft, bought Palm, tried Android. The devices ended up on fire sale. As Jonathan put it in the book, "HP lost because it did everything right." Apple is now worth sixty times HP and HPE combined.
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I don't think I've ever met Jonathan Brill, although a quick perusal of his career shows many common travels. Here's his impressive Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Brill
He must have followed Phil McKinney, another HP futurist long after my time there. Phil also has had some 'unseemly' comments about HP innovation in recent years, but I won't list them here.
What I will cite is a comparison experience of my own. I spent 20 years at HP in the oscilloscope division (although I kept trying end-runs like XY displays and Logic Analyzers and Program Development Systems to combat a fierce and capable Tektronix), and then nine years back in Palo Alto and etc. in other roles including Corporate Engineering Director. Along the way, I gained 'fame' or more accurately 'notoriety' with the David Packard Medal of Defiance, and Electronics' magazine Engineer of the Year, and other accolades (some of them even were appropriate, but most of the work was shared and collegial, not 'mine' alone by any means).
The key point is that four times I wound up in front of the founders to describe some new 'fool-hardy' projects, and three times I either got permission or was able to continue without being thwarted. The last time was a bit noteworthy, which I've never put in writing before, and it was more-or-less my swan song for HP. I was leading a new software division (SESD, which stood for Software Engineering Systems Division), and presenting an idea to HP's Executive Council to change HP's accounting system so that software divisions got credit for part of the computer system sales revenue when their SW wa;s bundled.
Parenthetic note: I'd already (four years prior), gotten HP to adopt the Return Map for project accounting (see Harvard Biz Review https://hbr.org/1991/01/the-return-map-tracking-product-teams) as noted in today's AI summary: The "Return Map," developed at Hewlett-Packard, provides a way for people from different functions to triangulate on the product development process as a whole. It graphically represents the contributions of all team members to the moment when a project breaks even. The tool serves as a graphical representation designed to align diverse, cross-functional teams toward the same goals.
After giving the talk, I walked out of the room with EVP Lew Platt, soon to be CEO. He said, "Wow! I've seen you give many original talks that shocked an audience. But I've never seen you give one that uniformly pissed off everyone in the room."
Needless to say, I didn't get the order. Nor did HP get the message. So HP Image never competed with Oracle, nor did HP Networks compete with Cisco, and on and on. Giving the software away to move the hardware worked great for profit-oriented hardware divisions, but was the death-knell for every software division for years.
But that was one failure against three successes.
Later, I spent several years at Intel, and as it happened, I had four opportunities to meet with their Exec Council to pitch some new 'fool-hardy' project. And four times, they approved it. But inexplicably, four times they failed to fund it. For the swan-song after the last pitch (for essentially a "Zoom-like" product in 2005), I left to join Stanford to lead MediaX. And, a chary view might say, "to learn how academia is able to thwart innovation!"
So, kudos to Jonathan Brill and Phil McKinney and the legions of others who bent their pick on the ever-receding HP innovation gene.
