The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company (Collins Business Essentials)

took forty years for the company Bill Hewlett and I started in 1939 to reach one billion dollars in annual sales and a major part of that was from inflation. In the 1994 fiscal year that ended last October, we began the year with twenty billion dollars in worldwide sales and added five billion to that by year’s end. This occurred with essentially n

Today Hewlett-Packard operates in many different communities throughout the world. We stress to our people that each of these communities must be better for our presence. This means being sensitive to the needs and interests of the community; it means applying the highest standards of honesty and integrity to all our relationships with individuals

Before I went to Washington, even the people who encouraged me to go warned me that a career in business would ill prepare me for the frustrations of government bureaucracy. And they were right.

I have always felt that the most successful companies have a practice of promoting from within.

An important responsibility of managers is the selection and training of their potential successors. Management succession is especially critical at the upper levels of an organization, where a manager may be responsible for a wide scope of complex activities involving the expenditure of many millions of dollars and the efforts of many thousands of

So in 1957, when we established a corporate personnel department, we were careful in defining its role and responsibilities. It was to support management, not supplant it.

Shortly after my arrival at the Pentagon, I called on all four of the Joint Chiefs in their offices and told them I wanted to work with them and that I needed their help. Bill and I had a deer hunt every year at our San Felipe ranch southeast of San Jose. He and I brought all the food, and we cooked and served the meals and washed the dishes oursel

WHEN I THINK OF the phenomenal growth of the electronics industry over the last fifty years, I realize how fortunate Bill Hewlett and I were to be in on the ground floor. But it reminds me of a story I like to tell on myself. In my sophomore year at Stanford I took a course in American history and had the opportunity to study the westward movement

Another example of sharing, though in a much different way, occurred in 1970. Because of a downturn in the U.S. economy, our incoming orders were running at a rate quite a bit less than our production capability. We were faced with the prospect of a 10 percent layoff. Rather than a layoff, however, we tried a different tack. We went to a schedule o