[time-nuts] Book Review (RE: HP History with Dymec: "Becoming Hewlett Packard. Why Strategic Leadership Matters")

Sun Feb 3 08:48:44 UTC 2019

Hi time-nuts,
I’ve read most of the book “Becoming Hewlett Packard.  Why Strategic Leadership Matters”, and promised a review.

I suspect that most of you would not enjoy the book that much.

It is written as an extended case study, in the style of a Graduate Business School Thesis.   The authors have some kind of faculty association with Stanford University Business School – and thus the interest in HP.

The book spends a lot of time setting a foundation for what kind of thinking is needed to strategically lead a company, then methodically walks through HP’s history of CEOs:  Dave Packard, Bill Hewlett, John Young, Lew Platt, Carli Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker, and finally Meg Whitman.

The interesting Test and Measurement bits are in the Dave Packard section, where it describes how he crated the division structure for the company, with the 4 initial product lines:  Audio/Video, Frequency Counters, Microwave, and Oscilloscopes.  This worked great, because each business could operate independently, with their own R&D, marketing, manufacturing and building.    There is some history on the development of the product lines from a technical standpoint, but not much.  I suspect that the “Bill and Dave” book below would be more interesting to a technical audience.

The bulk of the book deals with the challenges HP CEOs had in adapting this independent division structure into an integrated company that can sell integrated computer system products.   Each CEO is dissected on their success, but mostly failures, to do this well.    While written with a fairly positive tone, it is quite unvarnished in the struggles the CEOs had, from John Young on, to transform HP into a computer company.    And how the “founders” Board of Directors, build by Packard in the 60s and 70s, was dysfunctional in their support of CEOs not named Hewlett or Packard.

Since the T&M business was spun off into Agilent in 1999, it was all computers and printers after that.   The inkjet printer organization that I joined in 1993 was probably the most like the old HP after Agilent spun off, in that it is very technology driven, very vertically integrated where we invent almost all our components, and dominate the market.

I endured every CEO that is analyzed, so found the book quite interesting.   I watched HP, one of the most amazing places to work in the 1970s, transform into a company that could be generously be described as average today, but improving under Meg Whitman in my opinion.    Things started to unravel under Lew Plat, were mixed and sliding under Carli (cheers were shouted in the building when her firing was announced), and miserable (but profitable) under Mark Hurd.   HP has been improving, from an employee perspective under Meg Whitman.    On the PCs and Printers side of HP Inc./HP Enterprise split,  HP Inc. has been slowly improving in the last three years.

Conclusion:  If you like corporate history and business leadership analysis, the book is OK.   If you want technology insights, pass.

Hugh Rice

From: time-nuts <time-nuts-bounces at lists.febo.com> On Behalf Of Tom Curlee
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2019 12:22 PM
To: Discussion of precise time and frequency measurement <time-nuts at lists.febo.com>
Subject: Re: [time-nuts] HP History with Dymec: "Becoming Hewlett Packard. Why Strategic Leadership Matters"

Speaking of books about HP, I highly recommend "Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the Worlds Greatest Company". It covers the history of HP including the development of many of the landmark pieces of test equipment, the HP business model, and the company expansion from the garage to a multi-national corporation.. Very approachable- reads almost like a novel. Being a big HP fan, I can't say enough good about the book.

Tom
--------------------------------------------
On Wed, 1/23/19, Rice, Hugh (IPH Writing Systems) <hugh.rice at hp.com<mailto:hugh.rice at hp.com>> wrote:

Subject: [time-nuts] HP History with Dymec: "Becoming Hewlett Packard. Why Strategic Leadership Matters"
To: "time-nuts at lists.febo.com<mailto:time-nuts at lists.febo.com>" <time-nuts at lists.febo.com<mailto:time-nuts at lists.febo.com>>
Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2019, 5:41 PM

Hello Time Nuts,
Being a bit new to HP (only 35 years),
I never head of Dymec before.  A quick Google search
yielded this link, which is an excerpt from the book
"Becoming Hewlett Packard,  Why Strategic Leadership
Matters."    You can read about 10 pages of the
book from the preview, which talks about HPs creation of the
Dymec corporation, which then became a division.
Scroll back to page 102 for some context.

https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=Zr1jDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA104&lpg=PA104&dq=dymec+company+history&source=bl&ots=Q_66Bj1viA&sig=ACfU3U2ITctr8yhZ_yXWCQ_v8qWClLXafw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixtsCj-oTgAhXJh3AKHXd3DqMQ6AEwDHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=dymec%20company%20history&f=false<https://books.google.com.sg/books?id=Zr1jDQAAQBAJ&pg=PA104&lpg=PA104&dq=dymec+company+history&source=bl&ots=Q_66Bj1viA&sig=ACfU3U2ITctr8yhZ_yXWCQ_v8qWClLXafw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwixtsCj-oTgAhXJh3AKHXd3DqMQ6AEwDHoECAUQAQ#v=onepage&q=dymec%20company%20history&f=false>

I plan to buy a copy of the book and
read it on my trip to Hong Kong this weekend.  If it
is interesting, I'll write a quick review for you all.

Tom V:  Let us know if we are
wandering too far off topic for time-nuts.

Hugh Rice

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