Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company

Some thoughts on “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company”.If you’re looking for inspiration as an entrepreneur or as a manager, it’s worth a read. The first thing that struck me was that Bill and Dave had similar interests to my own; they did the same sort of things in their youth, were fascinated by electronics, especially radio communications, and studied at a leading-edge university faculty under an inspirational mentor. Much the same as me. So how did they go on to found a billion dollar corporation and I didn’t? For a start, they were a lot more focussed: they applied themselves to their studies and appreciated the value of hard work. They had a clear objective: to set up a company together and make money from it. At their age, I had no desire to do that and was quite happy to be in secure employment. They were entrepreneurs, I was not - it’s that simple.HP’s first product was an audio oscillator which they sold to Walt Disney. It was used to synthesize music for the soundtrack of “Fantasia”. As they designed and built more products and generated more profit, a company with a unique ethos emerged: something they defined as “the HP Way”. It starts with the imperative for any company: to generate profit. But this must be achieved by designing innovative products which customers want to buy because they are useful and offer good value.All of that seems obvious, but there’s much more to it. HP pioneered many working practices and employee benefits that we consider as standard today: the open-plan office, profit-sharing bonuses, stock purchase schemes, flexible working hours, management by objective.The most important thing I learned during my 14 year stay at HP: you can’t be an effective manager sitting in your office. You need to get out and talk to people at every level in the organisation. Take the pulse of each activity, find the problems and rectify them; look for the opportunities and exploit them. If the toilet cleaner can’t do their job effectively and visiting customers notice, it could affect your sales. If someone has a good idea for a new product or service, tease it out of them and see if it’s viable. An important HP principle: MBWA = Management By Walking Around.As a young product support engineer, I got involved in automating test routines for use by our service offices. What previously had required a written procedure in a service manual could now be programmed onto one of the new HP “desktop computers” and communicated to the instruments under test using the “Hewlett Packard Interface Bus” (a forerunner of USB). The R&D Manager noticed in passing, and asked if I would be interested in adapting this technique to develop an automated telecomms network monitoring system. HP had a high-end computerised system already, but it was far too expensive for our smaller customers. Before I knew it, I was the owner of one of HP’s “skunk projects” - developed unofficially under the bench before being presented as a product candidate. 3,000 lines of BASIC code later, we had a saleable product. Bill Hewlett was visiting one day. He came into the computer room where I was working and we chatted informally - it was really strange, because he treated me as a colleague, not a minor pawn in a huge organisation of which he was CEO. He was interested and seemed to understand every nut and bolt of what I was doing. It also seemed extraordinary that he would want to pick the brain of a junior engineer for ideas, but that’s exactly what he did.MBWA.

This is one of those books that you can go back to every year. Just wish todays management read it and took some of the values from it and put it to good use..

Great book

Really comprehensive story of Hewlet Packard concentrating more on the founders role than the specifics of technology and products, although there is plenty of that as well. I really liked the book made me understand the company's history.

Ich finde das Buch sehr intressant und aufschlussreich.