One of our most important management tasks is maintaining the proper balance between short-term profit performance and investment for future strength and growth.

Bill and I had decided we were going to reinvest our profits and not resort to long-term borrowing. I felt very strongly about this issue, and we found we were clearly able to finance 100 percent growth per year by reinvesting our profits. After some discussion with the members of the board, they seemed to be impressed with what we were doing but

Especially in a technical business where the rate of progress is rapid, a continuing program of education must be undertaken and maintained.

I don’t argue that the job can’t be done that way, but I do argue strongly that the best job can be done when the manager has a genuine and thorough understanding of the work. I don’t see how managers can even understand what standards to observe, what performance to require, and how to measure results unless they understand in some detail the

In the United States and many other countries, employees participate in stock purchase plans and in cash profit sharing. U.S. employees with more than six months of service are eligible for profit sharing, and each year receive amounts calculated on the company’s pretax earnings. Over the years this payout has been as high as 9.9 percent and as low

In 1994, HP’s sales in computer products, service, and support were almost $20 billion, or about 78 percent of the company’s total business. In 1964, our sales totaled $125 million and were entirely in instruments. Not a penny was from computer sales. This represents a remarkable transformation of our company and its business. It would be nice to

The counter was so useful when it did work that our customers tolerated its unreliability.

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

Thus, we made an early and important decision: We did not want to be a “hire and fire”—a company that would seek large, short-term contracts, employ a great many people for the duration of the contract, and at its completion let those people go. This type of operation is often the quickest and most efficient way to get a big job accomplished. But