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

I had to work very hard at Latin, but the math and science courses were easy because I already knew about as much as the teachers did. I was elected president of my class all four years.

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

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

Growth also affected the size and nature of company picnics. Bill and I considered picnics an important part of the HP Way, and in the early days we had an annual picnic in the Palo Alto area for all our people and their families. It was a big event, one largely planned and carried out by our employees themselves. The menu consisted of New York ste

Keeping storerooms and parts bins open was advantageous to HP in two important ways. From a practical standpoint, the easy access to parts and tools helped product designers and others who wanted to work out new ideas at home or on weekends. A second reason, less tangible but important, is that the open bins and storerooms were a symbol of trust, a

Our long-standing policy has been to reinvest most of our profits and to depend on this reinvestment, plus funds from employee stock purchases and other cash flow items, to finance our growth. The stock purchase plan allows employees to apply up to a certain percentage of their salaries to purchase shares of HP stock at a preferential price. The co

I believe this decision to focus our efforts was extremely important, not only in the early days of the company but later on as well. During the war, for example, we could have taken on some big—at least for us—production contracts. But that would have built the company to a level that probably couldn’t be sustained later on. I felt that we should

A constant flow of good new products is the lifeblood of Hewlett-Packard and essential to our growth. Early on we developed a system for measuring the flow and success of new products.