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

“But they had a great idea—the ultimate source of competitive advantage—if you can just see it,” I’d push back. “What might that be?” After ten or fifteen minutes, someone would likely voice the key point: Bill Hewlett and David Packard’s greatest product was not the audio oscillator, the pocket calculator, or the minicomputer. Their greatest produ

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 B

These miscellaneous jobs made us more sure of ourselves and our skills. They also revealed something we hadn’t planned but that was of great benefit to our partnership—namely, that our abilities tended to be complementary. Bill was better trained in circuit technology, and I was better trained and more experienced in manufacturing processes. This c

Kenzo Sasaoka, our manager in Japan, and he said that I had shown him the way—that gains in quality come from meticulous attention to detail and every step in the manufacturing process must be done as carefully as possible, not as quickly as possible. This sounds simple, but it is achieved only if everyone in the organization is dedicated to qualit

Noel, a key member of our top-management team, was a strong advocate for helping the customer, so much so that he wanted our sales engineers to take the customer’s side in any disputes with the company. “We don’t want you blindly agreeing with us,” he’d tell them. “We want you to stick up for the customer. After all, we’re not selling hardware; we’

Get the best people, stress the importance of teamwork, and get them fired up to win the game.

As we investigate this, we inevitably come to the conclusion that a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution to society (a phrase which sounds trit

It needs to be frequent, friendly, unfocused, and unscheduled—but far from pointless. And since its principal aim is to seek out people’s thoughts and opinions, it requires good listening.

HP we often used to select projects on the basis of a six-to-one engineering return. That is, the profit we expected to derive over the lifetime of a product should be at least six times greater than the cost of developing the product. Almost without exception, the products that beat the six-to-one ratio by the widest margin were the most innovativ

them. I found, after much trial and error, that applying steady gentle pressure from the rear worked best. Eventually, one would decide to pass through the gate; the rest would soon follow. Press them too hard, and they’d panic, scattering in all directions. Slack off entirely, and they’d just head back to their old grazing spots. This insight was