In the fall of 1930, David Packard left his hometown of Pueblo, Colorado, to enroll at Stanford University, where he befriended another freshman, Bill Hewlett. After graduation, Hewlett and Packard decided to throw their lots in together. They tossed a coin to decide whose name should go first on the notice of incorporation, then cast about in search of products to sell. Today, the one-car garage in Palo Alto that housed their first workshop is a California historic landmark: the birthplace of Silicon Valley. And Hewlett-Packard has produced thousands of innovative products for millions of customers throughout the world. Their little company employs 98,400 people and boasts constantly increasing sales that reached $25 billion in 1994. While there are many successful companies, there is only one Hewlett-Packard, because from the very beginning, Hewlett and Packard had a way of doing things that was contrary to the prevailing management strategies. In defining the objectives for their company, Packard and Hewlett wanted more than profits, revenue growth and a constant stream of new, happy customers. Hewlett-Packard's success owes a great deal to many factors, including openness to change, an unrelenting will to win, the virtue of sustained hard work and a company-wide commitment to community involvement. As a result, HP now is universally acclaimed as the world's most admired technology company; its wildly successful approach to business has been immortalized as The HP Way. In this book, David Packard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his life's work and of the truly exceptional company that he and Bill Hewlett started in a garage 55 years ago.

The definitive history of Hewlett-Packard and its legendary founders, based on unprecedented access to private archivesThis is the most authoritative version ever of the most famous start-up story in business history. In 1938, working out of a small garage in Palo Alto, California, two young Stanford graduates named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built their first product, an audio oscillator. It was the start not only of a legendary company but of an entire way of life in Silicon Valley'and, ultimately, our modern digital age. Others have written about the rise of Hewlett-Packard, including Packard himself in a bestselling memoir. But acclaimed journalist Michael S. Malone is the first to get the full story, based on unlimited and exclusive access to corporate and private archives, along with hundreds of employee interviews. Malone draws on his new material to show how some of the most influential products of our time were invented, and how a culture of innovation led HP to unparalleled success for decades. He also shows what was really behind the groundbreaking management philosophy'the HP Way'that put people ahead of products or profits. There have been attempts in recent years to discredit the HP Way as soft and outdated. But Malone argues that the HP Way was a hard-nosed business philosophy that combined simple objectives, trust in employees to make the right choices, and ruthless self-appraisal. It created an innovative and ferociously competitive company'arguably the world's greatest company. This business adventure story will be perfect for entrepreneurs, young managers, and students, not to mention the tens of thousands of current and former HP employees.

The HP Phenomenon tells the story of how Hewlett-Packard innovated and transformed itself six times while most of its competitors were unable to make even one significant transformation. It describes those transformations, how they started, how they prevailed, and how the challenges along the way were overcome—reinforcing David Packard's observation that "change and conflict are the only real constants." The book also details the philosophies, practices, and organizational principles that enabled this unprecedented sequence of innovations and transformations. In so doing, the authors capture the elusive "spirit of innovation" required to fuel growth and transformation in all companies: innovation that is customer-centered, contribution-driven, and growth-focused. The corporate ethos described in this book—with its emphasis on bottom-up innovation and sufficient flexibility to see results brought to the marketplace and brought alive inside the company—is radically different from current management "best practice." Thus, while primarily a history of Hewlett-Packard, The HP Phenomenon also holds profound lessons for engineers, managers, and organizational leaders hoping to transform their own organizations. "At last! The 'HP Way, that most famous of all corporate philosophies, has taken on an almost mythical status. But how did it really work? How did it make Hewlett-Packard the fastest growing, most admired, large company of the last half-century? Now, two important figures in HP's history, Chuck House and Raymond Price, have finally given us the whole story. The HP Phenomenon is the book we've been waiting for: the definitive treatise on how Bill and Dave ran their legendary company, day to day and year to year. It should be a core text for generations of young entrepreneurs and managers, a roadmap to building a great enterprise."—Michael S. Malone, author of Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company

The author of "Merchants of Death" presents the fascinating story behind one of the fiercest corporate battles in years--the fight between the sons of Hewlett-Packard's founders and the company's powerful new female CEO.

This book documents how HP's successive CEOs have contributed to the company's process of corporate becoming. The strategic leadership frameworks used to illuminate these contributions will be helpful for theory development and offer practical tools for founders of new companies and CEOs and boards of directors of existing companies.

An insider's look at the internal turmoil at one of the world's premier high-tech companies This is the inside story of Hewlett-Packard Company's struggle to regain its former glory, and of the high-stakes battle between CEO Carly Fiorina and family scion Walter Hewlett over how best to achieve that goal. For decades, HP was admired not only for its innovative products and soaring stock price, but for its egalitarian corporate culture and father-knows-best integrity. Backfire explains how the company fell on hard times, recounts the historic decision that made Fiorina the world's top-ranking female executive, and brings to life the backlash that resulted when she tried to impose her charismatic salesmanship on the aging icon. Top BusinessWeek journalist Peter Burrows gives the dramatic blow-by-blow of Hewlett's effort to kill Fiorina's most controversial move of all, her $19 billion purchase of rival Compaq Computer. Fiorina won by a whisker, after the most expensive proxy fight in history and a dramatic lawsuit that accused the company of illegally fixing the vote. This gripping, ongoing story includes fascinating personalities and dramatic boardroom and courtroom drama. Peter Burrows (Alameda, CA) has been a technology reporter for BusinessWeek for nine years and has covered the HP saga from the start. The department editor for BusinessWeek's computer coverage, he has been the principal chronicler of Fiorina's tenure at HP, and has written three cover stories on the subject. He has also written numerous other cover stories, including looks at Steve Jobs's Apple Computer and Sun Microsystems' Scott McNealy.

The "HP Way" has attained a kind of mythological status for anyone familiar with the company's history of phenomenal growth and innovative culture. It's a different way of thinking about business, of managing people, of integrating the broader interests of society--a way that not only sparked Silicon Valley, but impacted the entire world. Trope Publishing Co.'s The Evolving Way celebrates HP's storied history and examines how the HP Way evolves to meet each moment, each challenge, and how its principles continue to shine the light forward.