The Interpersonal Culture at Hewlett-Packard

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The Interpersonal Culture at Hewlett-Packard
by John Minck

As HP emerged from the WWII manufacturing facility in the Redwood Building on Page Mill Rd, Bill came back from US Army scientific service in the Signal Corps. Some tough layoffs (about 30%) took place, for about a year as wartime contracts were discontinued, as the personalities of Bill and Dave were instilling "The HP Way," a business philosophy brand new to American industry. This remarkable process on how they managed wasn't even named yet. Eventually, it had a name and became a written document for the way by which management and workers treated each other, to the benefit of better products, better invention processes, better production and much better human relations.

When anyone spends about one third of their working days with a team of motivated people, the personal relationships naturally develop as any social grouping. HP hired creative people - some brilliant technically, some more at home in outgoing pursuits such as marketing or HR. So when personal events came along, birthdays, the annual corporate picnic, retirements, company policy gave way to individual initiative, and HP often threw in the funding for a beer bust or a pizza party, or birthday events on site or offsite after work. Here are several examples.

Blake Peterson Nonagenarian Video -- 2020

Over the seven decades from 1950, it still goes on. This story involves one of the senior marketing engineers at Santa Rosa Division, Blake Peterson. Blake is long retired. He and his (deceased) wife had built a home near the plant where they raised their family. Sadly, that home was lost in the destructive Tubbs Fire of 2017. Blake and his partner, Sally, now live in her home in San Rafael.

Memories are long in that division so when Blake's 90th birthday loomed on Nov 1, 2020, one of his friends, John Harmon, decided to create a video remembrance of the event. He enlisted many of Blake's former colleagues and friends to create short video selfies and compiled them into a memorable video. As usual, creativity emerged, especially the short story of a "tech support" individual who visits a Monk of the Middle Ages, to help train him on the new book technology, which is replacing the previous scroll methods.

These two video files will reveal the sort of personal connections that develop over 30-40 years of working together.

Blake with a Keysight spectrum analyzer and the venerable HP141T spectrum analyzer Photo courtesy of Keysight Technologies

United Fund Support from 1988

The annual United Fund Drive at HP was a big deal, both Dave and Bill supported the community service aspect of our corporate objectives, and matched all contributions. Lou Packard was County Chairwoman for a couple years, and that year one of our SPD division execs was on the local Board.

In 1988, several of us determined to write a rap video promo for that year. Ray Shannon and I plus Marketing engineer Ed Cantrell were credited for the content. Ed was an acknowledged music expert, active in his Church music, and good at video postproduction. In fact, a few years later, when Ed left HP to return to his Michigan home, I think he became their Church Music Director.

Al Seely, The Boss

Debra Dunn, MaDunnA

Ray Shannon, L.L. Cool Ray

Mary Hyodo and Theresa Conroy were involved in the set backdrop. I was able to convert an old VHS tape to DVD to mp.4, which was about 35 MB. Thus the quality isn't so good.

United Fund Support

For a different year's promotion of the United Way Fund drive, the marketing department "volunteered" Eric Jennings, Marc Saunders, and me to lip sync the WWII Andrews Sisters, "Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy from Company C," for an outside barbeque event. Look at those legs-and combat boots!

United Way fund drive in the parking lot

The Annual Employee Picnic

Early HP was like a family. Christmas parties were organized, with Packard handing out the bonus checks to the crowd. Actually, that practice eventually was called off, because too many employees were arriving home long after the party, somewhat drunk, and some portion of their bonus check spent in local taverns.

The traditional summer picnic became a fun day for whole families, with wonderful food, games and a variety of horse rides and ball games, etc. HP bought the real estate for many picnic sites in nearby mountains, around the world. There was Little Basin near Palo Alto, Estes Park near Loveland in Colorado, and more. As the company grew, picnics were organized by Division. One year I recall, with employees and families, some 4000 people arrived. The food management and activities for kids was breathtaking. Ask any child who ever attended, and they will recall those events with pleasure.

Bill and Dave work the steak line in 1952

One interesting cultural difference resulted when HP tried to install the family picnic in the YHP operation, in Japan. John Brown was the co-manager for the division, on assignment from the U.S. Long prior to the week of the picnic, word went out to all employees that the employee's whole families were invited and supposed to come. But, on the day of the first employee picnic, only employees came, no families, no kids.

Brown was furious, because the value of getting employee's families into the mix was crucial. So the next year, he was extremely vocal in stating that there would be no excuses. It was causing such a cultural divide that an employee committee was sent in to see him, to try to persuade him that Japanese custom didn't permit wives and children to join men in company affairs. So, he had to make it a direct order, with serious consequences if not followed. That worked, because his employees observed direct orders, and took them to be more important than their learned culture that excluded their wives and kids. Needless to say, future picnics were highly successful, and the cultures "intermarried."

This HP Measure Magazine employee newsletter ran a global overview of HP company picnics across the dozens of cultures where we had offices. See Measure, August 1975.

Group Events

Birthdays and weddings and new babies, retirements and personnel moving to new locations, all got recognition, often organized by the department secretary, who kept track of such things. The division graphics artists would be enlisted for big-format cards, which they enjoyed doing because their daily work was repetitive technical diagrams and data sheets and such. These pix show my retirement card from the event in 1995. It was created by Mary Hyodo, remarkable likeness, from 25 years ago.

The wood shops or lab model shops or engraving and plating processing were often engaged for specialized memorial artifacts and plaques to memorialize the occasions.