HP Memories

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My Years in HP Corporate PR, by Dave Kirby

- Part 3 -

The Personalities of Greatness

Part 3 - Table of Contents:

3. The Personalities of Greatness

I wanted to use this section of my memoir to talk about some of the unique HP personalities I worked for and worked with. I wanted to cover them both from a business style as well as a human or personal style, because I thought these insights might be useful to readers who are studying the history of HP. I did have a job that offered me a unique perspective to the way these men thought and operated on a daily basis. It was quite an experience to see these famous individuals, who had one image from outside the company, to the men that I could see from close up. I admired them all and worked hard for them.

From my viewpoint, my relationship with Dave Packard was spectacular, how lucky can one man get? Dave was an extraordinary human being that showed in his many years of successful leadership. Lew Platt, HP's CEO from 1995 to 2000, once made a statement, something to the effect that, "We are blessed just being in the proximity of this man." I was always fascinated by the fact that he seemed to have innate managerial qualities. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was a lawyer, so there were no particular examples of leadership or business leadership from his family. Yet, it so happened that he picked up the positive traits of both parents, learning the excellence of a teacher and thoroughness of a lawyer.

Considering that he was just 30 years old in 1942, as the war production started, and his little company expanded, we have to assume that he just grew into this crucial management role. He had no prior experience of leadership, he went to Stanford and then spent a year as a test engineer at General Electric, in Schenectady. But then almost immediately, he started the HP partnership with Bill. He did play varsity football at Stanford, but I don't think he was captain. I guess you could say that he was a born business leader. And then you could leave out the word business and also call him a born leader. He had all the traits that you would associate with leadership.

This will surprise you, since I also feel he was an outstanding engineer. Bill Hewlett usually got the credit for being the HP engineer of an equal status to our resident genius, Barney Oliver. Packard did invent the model 400A, a voltmeter. But then as the war started, Bill Hewlett entered the U.S. Army, and Packard had to take over the small business as it started to produce equipment for the war effort. Packard never got any credit for his engineering knowledge, nor did he seek credit. He was never going into the lab to invent something as Hewlett felt so comfortable in doing. But he still had the internal engineering knowledge that allowed him to keenly evaluate project proposals and status reports and production problems all through the years. Dave's small company got up to a couple hundred employees by the end of WWII.

Packard was smart but he also had a lot of wisdom. These are different. Many people are smart, but Dave was wise. For example, he had the ability to go into a group project meeting of some sort, which was going to pay off sometime in the future. Everybody's excited about it, but then Packard would say, if you look out 3 1/2 years from now, there's some event that's coming which will have a bearing on this project nobody here has mentioned. It might change the entire feasibility of your proposal. He had that natural foresight and vision which many other people didn't seem to exhibit in their enthusiasm.

Dave Packard had the ability to bring out the best in the people he knew and worked with. That to me was one of his best traits. He certainly hired well, although most of the early key managers were with him from the beginning. Barney and Eldred and Porter had all been with Bill and Dave at Stanford. In turn he also hired people with the qualities that can bring out the best in their staff. He wanted his traits to be transferable. It seems pretty clear to me that the basic work culture at HP, which came to be so well known and practiced, as The HP Way, came right from the top. And although both Bill and Dave promulgated a style that formed The HP Way, I suspect that it was Bill who introduced more humanity into HP culture.

I have been fascinated by just how the HP work culture developed, which became widely known as The HP Way. It had to come directly from Dave and Bill, and yet I feel that more of that credit belongs to Bill. Dave was the power manager, a very tall symbol of determination and vision. But alongside was Bill, "Now, Dave, take it easy." Bill seemed to be the humane side of their remarkable partnership. Certainly they both agreed on some major principles,

1) Management by Objective, MBO, which endowed everyone below with TRUST. If we tell you where we are going, we trust you to do the right things to get it done. Use all your creativity.

2) Management by Walking Around, MBWA, which demonstrated to all, from middle managers to the production line assemblers, that they had their people's lives at heart. Some were better at MBWA than others, Ed Porter and John Doyle come to mind.

3) Open Door Policy, a specific policy to provide openness which gave warning to middle managers, that if they weren't sensitive to their employees, to listen to concerns that are important to the company, that the employee was permitted to go over their heads to be heard. A variation of the concept of Ombudsman.

Coming right from the top, all management found that fostering these principles just simply worked well in establishing the trusting atmosphere across the growing company. I have never been clear just when the term, The HP Way, came into existence. Measure Magazine devoted an entire issue to the HP Way in July, 1977. Packard's book, The HP Way, didn't come along until 1995. But the way that one employee treated another one was a reality, probably from the start. In hundreds of "Dave & Bill" stories, they often contained an anecdote that emphasized the humanity of Dave or Bill or other top execs. Incidentally, the HP corporate website has compiled a few pages of Packard anecdotes at this URL: Click HERE

I wonder what happened to Mel's boss? But that was the same Bill Hewlett who in 1970 came up with the employee-friendly "Nine Day Fortnight." He concluded that with sales and revenues down because of the national economy, that we could adjust our production capacity to fit the reduced sales by taking 10% off of our worker hours. He announced that everyone would take off every other Friday. It was recognized in industry as an unusual and extremely employee-friendly management move. Everybody happily shared the pain including managers right up to the top. In normal industry the top and middle management would never ever get any reductions in salary but for Hewlett that was just the fair way to do it.

Among us staffers, sitting near the executive row, there was a kind of a continuous question about who scared you the most; Bill or Dave? Most people would obviously say Dave because his very presence was formidable. But in my opinion it was Bill, and I would hang it on this attribute. He asked so god-damn many questions that he always scared me. Packard would just say how's it going today. But when I was going to see Bill about some PR question, I would try to think up every answer that I might need before I went in. I knew he was going to ask me details on whatever project was active. I think it was Bill's innate curiosity that made him do that. And usually the first one he would ask would be one I had never considered and it happened over and over. He was not easy with such questions. He was dead serious.

There was probably a question among some that Bill wasn't up to the task of CEO, when Packard moved to the DOD. And yet Bill had been co-managing with Dave, albeit in the background, up until that time. He set up a three-man executive committee including Eldred and perhaps Young or Lee. It seems to me that Bill is the one who thought the most about personnel policies. He was the who seemed to be looking out for the little guy. Bill deserves the credit for a lot of things that were good about HP.

On that score, his employee sensitivity was better than Packard, no doubt about it. I don't think you'd walk in to Packard and say I've been laid off. Bill Hewlett was in the Army, and it turned out he worked for an Army officer who came from the Western Electric (WECO) whose name was Jim McRae. McRae knew a lot about big-time electronics production. WECO had been in massive production of phone equipment for decades, and I can imagine Bill picking McRae's brain for future use at HP. It was Hewlett's Army job to survey the military needs for new electronic technologies like radars and electronic warfare. And Bill would then go to the MIT Radiation Lab or Fred Terman's Radio Research Lab that built countermeasures. He would work with them to design and build these required breakthroughs for the military.

So I expect that these military experiences certainly helped him with management experience when he returned to HP in the middle 1940s. He was pretty young, in his early 30s when he had this very responsible job to set the future directions of military electronics, and win the war. It gave him a real insight into the applications of Hewlett-Packard products like signal generators and other test products. So Hewlett's wartime experience ended up being fairly crucial, not just from his knowledge of military needs but from the fact that he met Art Fong and personally arranged for him and others like Bruce Wholey to be hired and come to California to work for HP.

One final story about Bill will show his humorous side. In 1964, shortly after I arrived at HP and started my PR work, Hewlett reminded me that the company's first significant sale was to Walt Disney studios in 1939. Hewlett had invented a new audio oscillator and Disney wanted eight of them to assist in making the movie Fantasia.

Bill said to me, "I have an idea I'd like to try. You know, it's the 25th anniversary of HP, and I'm thinking we can make a model of the 200A oscillator in miniature, about half size, silver-plate it and present it to Walt Disney." Here I am, relatively new, so I agreed that's a great idea. So he had this model made in the HP model shop, and it took some doing, with the silver-plating.

The plan was to visit Disney Studios in Los Angeles when Hewlett and I attended the annual Westcon electronics trade show there. Hewlett knew an engineer at Disney, who would arrange the presentation to Walt Disney.

So I met Bill at the airport and he had a box under his arm with the model. The engineer met us at Disney Studios and escorted us to Disney's office. He said Walt would be along shortly. Being in the office was a real eye-opener. There were photographs of the most notable people in the world; Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, the Queen of England, and various others - all signed. So we're sitting there and Disney came in and was introduced to Bill and me. And then, after an awkward silence, Bill started to explain the occasion and opened the box.

At that point, Bill and I realized that Disney hadn't been briefed on the presentation. He had no idea who we were or why we there. So here we are, like two idiots, opening a box and pulling out this model oscillator, which Disney looked at askance. Bill tried to explain it to him, and Disney, wondering what the hell it was, replied, "This is great, my grandchildren will love this," like it was a toy. So the whole thing was a disaster and pretty soon Bill and I are backing out of the office.

We got in the car in silence and Bill said to me, "Well, that didn't go over very well, did it?' It was an embarrassment for Hewlett, who had come up with the idea in the first place. And, over the years, Bill relished telling the story to others -- but with a twist. We'd be at a dinner, maybe eight people at the table, and Hewlett would turn to me and say, "Dave, tell them about that crazy idea you had to present a 25th Anniversary oscillator to Disney." From that point on, he'd laughingly put the blame on me.

When I retired from HP in 1989, Hewlett was out of town at the time but sent me a laudatory note praising me for all of the good work over the years for HP. And then he added that the only downer he could remember was the Disney fiasco. Then he said, "However, it's been so long ago that I think we can now blame the screw-up on Packard."

When I joined L.C. Cole in my PR role, I was given this list of clients including Hewlett-Packard. Bob Orr was a senior Cole account exec, and was the only person I knew that was connected to Hewlett-Packard. He said he wanted me to meet Noel Eldred, so we had lunch. I was impressed with Eldred, and I thought he had a good mind. He was a sophisticated marketing executive. Noel was at Stanford with Dave and Bill, although not in the same class, I think he was a year older. He was not as close to Dave and Bill as Ed Porter was. Porter was also at Stanford with Dave and Bill and Barney Oliver.

I certainly did not put Noel's knowledge of electronics and engineering up anywhere close to that of Bill and Dave. I figured he knew enough to do a good job of marketing. Noel did not join HP right away after graduation. Instead he worked at a company called Heinz & Kaufman. H&K manufactured high power transmitter tubes in South San Francisco. An interesting sidelight, Eitel and McCullough both worked at Heinz, but left due to product disagreements, and started their own legendary high power tube company in San Bruno. In the late 1930s, Fred Terman maintained relations with those local electronics manufacturing companies, and helped Bill and Dave make connections with local businesses, like Charlie Litton, who allowed HP to use some of his manufacturing processes.

Bob Orr and Noel were very good friends. They not only worked together on HP advertising, but because of Noel, Bob spoke highly of all HP people. So here I was with part of my Cole job to do the PR work at HP, I was also supposed to write some technical articles and some business articles for HP. These were intended for the various electronic trade magazines like Electronics and Electronic News. So part of my job was to develop good relations and get to know those magazine editors who could facilitate getting HP articles published. It was my impression that HP did little or none of this technical article placement before I came into the operation, either with L.C. Cole or after I joined HP.

Right about that same time I hired in, Eldred also hired Ross Snyder out of Ampex. Ross had done some years of actual audio engineering on tape recorders. His name is mentioned on a custom recording technology associated with Les Paul and his multiple track steel guitar recordings. Ross's primary job at HP was to be the full-time technical PR manager and he was a gem. Another great hire by Eldred. Ross was the pre-eminent editorial relations person, he was a gourmet food lover and a committed wine aficionado, with a wine cellar of 2000+ bottles. He made an annual trip to France to resupply his cellar. Trade magazine editors loved to be invited to dinner with Ross.

There were a number of instances where the media would call in to HP to get a reaction to some business or technical event. So I would set about to collect the internal views and prepare a summary response for release. I could usually put together enough in preparation for working with Eldred, or other executives, for an approved document. Noel would be the spokesman and I would put the words in his mouth as much as I could. At that time in the early 60s, HP had acquired all the independent sales representative businesses, and Noel was up to his eyeballs integrating all of these brand-new Hewlett-Packard sales divisions into our sales operation. This involved business and financial and HR issues, as well as sales training, order processing and the important task of shedding other business lines that had been in their portfolios prior to their being folded into the HP organization. These were companies like Varian and Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton (strain gauges) and even Tektronix in a case or two.

After purchasing these independent businessman, Noel had to convince them that they now reported into a large company with important national images to protect. So some of the wild performances that they had gotten away with as independent businessmen had to stop. For example, the Neely calendars. These were ink blotters (remember this was the fluid ink pen era) about the size of a number 10 envelope. One blotter per month, distributed on request to customers. The problem was that the picture on the front was a pin-up type image of a scantily clad woman, done by one of the noted women artists of the time, such as George Petty. That practice stopped immediately.

I joined HP in 1962, and the negotiations were still going on, probably about half of the sales organizations were acquired. John Young had gone over to work for Ed van Bronkhorst in 1961, to organize the purchase of all the sales reps businesses. So the actual transition probably took place just about the time that I was coming into the company. Eldred was very busy and actually I spent very little time with him, even though technically I reported to him. I always found that talking to Noel was a real pleasure because he not only dealt easily with people but his knowledge of marketing was superb. He was a good guy and he was bright and I was always trying to get some kind of a reading on why he had hired Peter Sherrill. I always felt that Sherrill's personality didn't particularly fit the HP mold.

Most of my contacts developed through Ron Whitburn, who worked for Sherrill in an applications writing slot. I think the instruction manuals were also produced in that group and Steve Duer, of course, managed the production of HP's big annual catalog. I wasn't doing much to start out. Since I didn't seem to be doing too much, Bob Orr was worried a bit about my job performance. Since I now worked for HP, it was none of his business, his being with L.C. Cole. He wrote a memo to Bill Haberman at Cole telling Bill that Kirby was not producing enough for Hewlett-Packard, even though HP had not said anything. That was strange. I felt pretty confident, in spite of that letter, because I knew of my growing relationship at HP with Packard and all the other top managers. It was probably Orr just worried about his own relationship which was 90% with Eldred. I don't remember that Noel was in any particular social group with the other executives at HP. Eldred and Orr and his wife were fairly close, and they would go to Tahoe together for vacations.

Noel managed some unusual people beyond Sherrill. For example, Carl Mahurin was a personality in his own right, and was in charge of the Service Department. Interestingly, Carl was an agronomist graduate of Stanford, and it's not quite clear how he fit in to this technological company? I believe he had been hired during WWII. In the end, he was a quite an amazing manager in his own style. It turned out he was a real track star at Stanford. Their track team set a new NCAA record for the 2-mile relay and Carl ran one leg in that relay. He was a second-best runner on the whole track team.

He never looked at physically strong because, by the time he was at HP for a number of years, he drank and smoked quite a bit, and put on a lot of weight. I was told that when training seminars were held in the Service Department, Carl would arrange a tennis match. Before the game, Carl would bumble around on the court, make some modest wager. He would then just destroy the visiting field engineer, who didn't know what was coming, and got sandbagged. Although the word got around, Carl was often successful for a long time.

Carl ran his Service Department with an exceptional sensitivity to customers. Part of his function was to organize customer training sessions for servicing newly introduced instruments. So customer technicians and even service managers came to Palo Alto to learn the latest techniques and measurement procedures. HP was inventing entirely new test techniques, and customers had to keep up.

One of Carl's most creative ideas was to have HP host a Service Managers Conference every two years. This was an industry-wide invitation, going mostly to customer service and metrology managers. In those years, the military and large aerospace and industry companies had centralized the repair and calibration of their inventory of measuring instruments. Those managers in a real sense were "gate keepers" of measuring instruments throughout their companies or military organizations. They also typically managed their company facility of primary standards, which government contracts called out to assure accurate measurements. Since their repair technicians got specialized on certain HP instruments, the manager often had the responsibility to review the lists of all intended new instrument purchases. That way his stock of repair parts and technician repair knowledge could be assigned to fewer model numbers. He could and often did substitute an HP model number on the purchasing list, thereby making his loyalty to HP very crucial.

Customers felt honored to be invited, and attendance typically would be up to 150 people. Carl arranged for industry speakers on current topics and measurement trends, with usually several HP lab speakers who would tantalize the attendees with expected new HP rollouts. It usually lasted 3 days and was appreciated by these key customers. The conference ended with a full banquet at the Palo Alto Hills Country Club, with a speech by Dave Packard, all at HP's expense. Many had brought their wives for the week, to enjoy San Francisco, and they were also invited to the banquet. Other high level HP executives were asked to attend so that customers got a real welcoming and appreciations for buying HP equipment.  HP Field Service Managers were invited so they could mingle with their customers.

Finally, I want to make a fundamental observation here. We talked about Hewlett-Packard and the people that work there. Most everybody had the impression that HP hired the very best people that they could find, and that they were staffed with these bright, creative people throughout. However, if you look at the reality of the HP staff, you would find some people who were not exactly the top-of-the-line folks. But I think that the HP management was so good that they were able to made good people out of mediocre ones. In a real sense the HP management culture brought out the best in their people and made them perhaps more than they themselves knew they could be.

I didn't work much with Ed Porter, and that was because he was responsible for HP manufacturing, which didn't much concern the press. Ed was a Stanford classmate of Bill and Dave (and a radio ham buddy of Barney). He was famous as a kid for being selected by GE as "the smartest kid in California," by getting the top score in a test they gave throughout the state. They asked him to join HP during the war, but he was a Navy officer and couldn't join until discharged. It was said that Bill Hewlett, who was then in the U.S. Army, posted to the Pentagon during WWII, recommended Ed to the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships, where he served in the infrared engineering dept.

Long before John Doyle coined the term, MBWA (Management by Walking Around) in the 1960s, Ed was an ever-present manager, out in the production areas every day. It was second nature to him to be out talking with employees, a real people person. In this way he was keeping directly informed about production problems, in all its aspects. Certainly Porter was popular with the assembly force, and most everyone knew him personally.

But I always wondered about his firm place in the business because he had a bit of a wild reputation. I knew he was close to Bill because of course they were at Stanford at the same time. Supposedly he had helped Bill academically, perhaps because Bill was dyslexic although we didn't find that out until a long time later. Bill was a local San Francisco boy, went to Lowell High up in San Francisco, his family was native San Franciscan. I think Porter was also local. His father was a minister in Palo Alto.

Porter was exceptional to the extent that he could run the City of Palo Alto in the morning for eight years and then come in and run the manufacturing part of Hewlett-Packard in the afternoons. As Mayor of Palo Alto, Ed presided over enormous changes to the character of what was a sleepy college town at the end of WWII. His vision was to build a healthy industrial and commercial base that solidified city finances for years to come. Two major accomplishments were the highly successful Stanford Shopping Center and working with Fred Terman to create the Stanford Industrial Park.

Porter also was instrumental in the development of the new combined Palo Alto/Stanford Hospital, which was built when Stanford moved their Medical School from San Francisco to the campus. A more controversial development was the creation of the Oregon Expressway and railroad underpass. This was intended to improve cross-town traffic flow from the Industrial Park to Bayshore Freeway. This boulevard called for the removal of 90 homes, and led to a split on the City Council, and in the community. It further led to an election referendum, which showed the close divisions in the voters, passing 9300 to 9000.

His City Council itself was split just about down the middle, with Bob Debs, Enid Pearson and Kirk Comstock, all standing up for no more commercial expansion. There was the Save our Skyline Committee and the Committee for Green Foothills, all organized to kill the proposed Superblock. Superblock was going to raze and destroy a full city block of residences and then construct a business commercial center. That went to a referendum vote of the residents and was killed. A lot of people thought his government attitudes were dictatorial since Porter tended to come down the side of an expanding city. Anne and I moved to Edgewood Drive in Palo Alto in 1976, after most of that confrontation had cooled down.

Porter belonged to the Palo Alto Club, a men's luncheon home on Melville Avenue. I'm a member now. This is a very exclusive businessman's club, perhaps a membership of 200. Porter was very popular there, naturally because he was mayor and the businessmen really worked to be his friend. City Fathers, the Movers and Shakers businessmen were all members. Dave Packard was a member and ate there most every day. I don't believe that Hewlett was a member, even though he lived right in Palo Alto about a mile away. Member Leo Ware got me into the club, and I was definitely not a mover or shaker. Then my wife's health went downhill in the early years of the 2000s and I had to drop out. I was too busy with care-giving in those years that I couldn't be involved with those social connections. After she died, Leo asked me to reconsider and I did go ahead and re-join the Club.

My relations with Barney were the same as with Porter. I never had much reason to work with him on public relations, for the reason that his HP life was mostly technical, without much interest by the media. However, the contacts I did have with Barney over the years were memorable. Barney had a very, very interesting personality, and not just the fact that he was a genius.

Most of his work and accomplishments were technical so this was more typically handled by Ross Snyder who did our technical PR. He did run for the presidency of the IEEE one year, but again, that was pitched to the engineering community and it didn't need  electioneering. In the case the IEEE you don't actually run for the office but you were sort of groomed for it by moving up from regional chairman to being on their national board. From there you got appointed to vice president for a year and then it's an automatic accession into the presidency.

One of the campaigns Barney did enter was when he ran for Chairman of the Palo Alto Board of Education. I remember some news item about Barney was in Herb Cain's column in the SF Chronicle. Packard had held that position way back in the 50's, and directed the massive building program to create enough schools in the city to handle the rapidly increasing child population.

It was always an interesting paradox to me that Barney would run for a people-oriented public office. A School Board can always be confrontational as hundreds of parents worry about their children's educational well-being. Barney was not naturally a people-oriented person, and he had little patience with stupidity. And yet when he did gain the job of Chairman for eight years and two terms, it did seem that the continuing contact with the public really did round off some of his rough edges. Don Hammond took over at the school board after Barney left that office. I think there's no question that the public service really humanized his personality. The school public didn't have to bow down before his genius nor should they.

Barney was very agnostic, which occasionally would run him into trouble with more religious people. This would come up in questions about the Palo Alto school curriculum. In one case he ended up writing a devastating letter supporting evolution to the state school education board. I also recall the story about Barney buying Packard's house when Packard moved to that 50-acre home site on Taaffe Street. Some other people he knew were moving into Palo Alto and Barney was showing them around. They were moving in from some educational institution in another state, maybe Harvard. One of the big Palo Alto real estate guys was with the group, showing them around. They were at a house up on a valley slope. The realtor was pointing out the view as a good point about that location. Among one of the views was a large Catholic church with a beautiful layout. The realtor mentioned the fact that that Catholic church would be one thing of interest to them. Barney responded by noting that he wouldn't worry about that view since a few plantings will take care of that view.

Barney had a mind that could provide insights on almost every subject. If you were working on electrical problem, he would refer to a mechanical analog, which made the solution more clear. For a mechanical problem, he would use a little optics to explain it. His mine was just interleaved with different physical insights. I heard that Barney's IQ was about 180. Barney married an amazingly talented Priscilla "Suki" Newton in 1945, she died in 1994. I guess it's not surprising that Suki was evidently quite religious whereas Barney was clearly not. That marriage of Barney and Suki seemed quite unusual, Suki was artistic, creative and Barney was everything else.

During the annual IEEE show in New York, the Olivers would not join the carousing HP contingents, but instead always went to the theater. Every night they went because Suki was so interested in the theater. She was an actress. Barney accommodated her talent and interests and charm. It's just such an interesting observation that a certified genius with such a wide variety of technical interests could also live with a very human person with dramatically different interests and loves. A clear proof that opposites attract.

When the Suki died, Barney wanted to have a gathering to honor her life. So he took over the church on Embarcadero at Louis Road. This immediately seemed like a bit of a contradiction because Barney was agnostic to a fault. I'm not sure which faith the church was, it doesn't matter. Barney just told the minister that he would take charge of the proceedings, and to take the day off. So Barney became the minister. Anne and I were there. Barney gave an astoundingly beautiful story about his life's love, in glowing terms. Their children spoke, a daughter named Gretchen. And the son. I remember that the son talked about the influence of his parents. Now here was a young man who was the son of a genius and a great artistic talent. He recalled being taught about geometry by his father. Can you imagine being taught geometry by Barney Oliver? A really intimidating thought by all of us who knew the HP Barney.

Looking at the Monterey posters, I think the funniest one I can recall featured Ralph Lee. I don't have the actual copy, they are archived in the HP library and unavailable. But I remember it showed him at a podium, giving a talk to roughly 500 Japanese, in Japan at YHP. Every person in the audience is listening intently to catch every word. In the caption that we put on the poster was this text, "This old c*** has got to cease!" That was such a typical verbal expression that was used quite a bit around HP, especially by Ralph, who was always pretty critical of poor operational performance. It was probably Bagley that came up with the caption, but Ralph's expression was dead serious. That was the beauty of the posters, in roasting managers, because they typically took a candid picture of a manager in an innocuous pose and then planted an unexpected caption on the cartoon balloon.

Ralph was a deadly enemy of partitioned offices. There were stories of him visiting divisions out in outlying cities and finding that regular executive offices had been put in. He would call in the facilities people and have the office partitions torn out and replaced with the usual multiple desks. The word got around the company that if Ralph was visiting your division, pay attention to your offices. Later on when HP went to the cubicle system, my guess is that he was not particularly happy with that. But it was such a strong movement, which was approved at CEO Young's level, that he couldn't do much about it. Employees loved cubicles because they cut down a bit on conversational noise, but did not eliminate it. But what it did do is to give some feeling of privacy and the ability to post pictures of the kids or other technical charts and that sort of thing.

I was told that one of the big advantages of having desks side-by-side, and an employee sitting near his boss, was really quite an advantage in training in the HP work culture. You could hear your boss talking to a field engineer or a production manager or perhaps even human relations. You could hear how he approached it and sold what he was talking about, all without really paying that much attention because it went on every day all day. It certainly added to me a feeling of no privacy because you couldn't talk to anyone without somebody hearing everything. But it worked for decades and in a real sense was a key part of the work culture. So from these discussions you could figure out who to call for certain problems, but also how the boss structured his questions to make the best impact and get a yes answer.

Ed van Bronkhorst, whom I really liked, was a great contributor at HP. He came from the Main, LaFrance accounting firm. He first began working for the firm on some financial projects at HP. Ed said to me once that Bill Hewlett was the luckiest engineer in Silicon Valley. He didn't mean Bill was lucky when he invented the 200A oscillator, but he was lucky to find Packard as a partner for their partnership.

Van Bronkhorst was hired to ultimately take over for Frank Cavier. Frank had been the HP finance man almost from the beginning of the partnership in 1942. Ed was first offered the job at HP and turned it down, mostly because he was expecting to be named a partner at Main, LaFrance. When that didn't happen, he came back and contacted Cavier, and reminded him that he had been offered a job earlier. He wondered if the offer might still be good? Cavier realized that his own financial acumen didn't really qualify him as the CFO of a major corporation. To his credit he knew his limits.

I think that it was to the skill and the feelings of Cavier and van Bronkhorst that their transition was made so smoothly. In other words, Dave and Bill worked with Cavier almost from the beginning of the company, and respected his feelings. They knew that he would be succeeded by a younger, more capable financial man. So Dave and Bill retained Frank, but his tasks were slowly moved over to van Bronkhorst. That transition technique seemed to happen occasionally, when various managers would reach the peak of their competence. They would not get retired but would maintain a senior consulting role.

John Young came into HP during the "Hire MBAs era" in the late 1950s. It's hard to tell just when the realization hit Bill and Dave and other top management, that there was a future succession problem for HP managers. It was perhaps in the middle 1950s, when they looked around and saw that all of the upper management were men who were in their own middle-age. They had all been born around the 1920s, and either served in the military like Bill Hewlett and Ed Porter and Al Bagley or had been in civilian war work like Eldred and Packard and Wholey and Cage.

HP had been hiring mostly BSEEs after the war and in the early 1950s, but someone must have realized that they should find people with more management education. The typical MBA curricula offered a wide list of expertise, accounting, legal, financial planning, organization, strategic considerations, and much more. This pointed to the need to hire some MBAs. John was part of a cohort of MBAs that included Dean Morton, Tom Perkins, Bill Jarvis, Frank Wezniak, Hank Taylor, Dan O'Rourke, and others. Cort Van Rensselaer had hired in a few years earlier from Stanford Business School. It's interesting that most of those new MBA hires came from either the Stanford Business School or the Harvard Business School. After the war the nation's business schools had began to emphasize in their Masters business programs the management lessons learned during the massive mobilization of WWII.

John hired in as a summer intern in 1957, and came full time in the middle of 1958. His engineering degree was from Oregon State, and he had then served several years in the USAF. He was assigned to the engineering staff for the rocket sled project of Col. John Stapp, at Holloman AFB in NM. Stapp was researching the problems of pilot bailout as jet airplanes began to hit 400 mph and approach Mach 1. The traditional bailout directly into the airstream was tantamount to being killed, and Stapp was testing bailout systems on a rocket sled. The test bed was a 1-mile long railroad rail system, guiding a ground sled propelled by a rocket motor. They used a long water trough at the far end that could slow down the sled at the end of its 600 mph run. It used a scoop that dipped into the water to decelerate.

At HP, one of John's earliest projects was reporting to Ed Van Bronkhorst, to work on the financial and operational details of HP's acquisition of all the Sales Rep companies. This was not a trivial undertaking because all of these independent businessmen were personal friends of Bill and Dave. So they had to get purchase agreements that respected the value of their companies, as well as some reduction in their independence. John's research and recommendations through Van Bronkhorst and up to Packard, for the final negotiations, were in a large part responsible for the fact that out of 13 independent businesses, fully 11 of them agreed to be acquired. And recognizing that these were highly independent-minded and opinionated owners, this was quite a feat.

As the Sales Rep acquisition project came to a successful conclusion, the decision had been made to create the first four charter divisions; Microwave, Frequency and Time, Audio-Video, and Oscilloscopes. Bruce Wholey took over as General Manager of the Microwave Division (MWD) and John was appointed to be his Marketing Manager. That was 1962. Just two years later as everyone was accommodating to the independent nature of operating divisions, the recently acquired Sanborn Division was getting into financial trouble. There was perceived to be a failure in strategic product planning. So Bruce Wholey was assigned to take over Sanborn and John Young was promoted to become the MWD manager in 1964.

John was credited with bringing what could be considered professional management into HP. Bill and Dave and the other WWII-era leaders were intuitive managers, learning as they grew. Nothing wrong with that. But John started with the central business strategy of HP, which was to invent new products, and grow at an average of 15% per year, growing with internally generated funds. He formalized the MWD's new product planning process to become a weekly Wednesday morning activity. Every month, each of the 4-5 product sections would meet with division leaders to review progress with the design team and update their own 5-year product plan. He thus engaged product planning and market research creativity at the lowest level of young managers.

Was John successful in his first general manager role? Resoundingly! The MWD grew from $20.4 million in 1964 to $75 million by 1969, a tripling of sales revenues in 5 years. The traditional HP growth of 15% per year would have merely doubled the $20.4 to $40 million in those same years. Out of this success, John was promoted to Vice-President of the Electronics Products Group in 1969. His next move to Executive Vice-President for Instruments, Computers and Components was in 1974. Finally in 1978, he was promoted to CEO. In his CEO role, which he held until his retirement in 1992, he took HP from $1.36 billion to $16.4 billion in those 14 years, which was just short of 20% compound annual growth. Remarkable.

Hewlett had taken over in 1971 when Packard went to the Pentagon. When Packard returned, he took back the Board Chairman position, and found that HP was planning to borrow $100-200 million. He was furious, and took a trip which became known as the "Give 'em Hell Trip" to the various divisions around the country. Inventory had gotten out of control and some of the production operations were not as efficient. Worse, payments from customers were way past the usual 30 days, in huge amounts. He really stirred things up. When Dave got back in his office after the tour, the loan got called off.

I didn't have much PR business with John, until the 1977-78 period as he became President and CEO. I found that, although he was not the super-friendly type of personality, I got along with him just fine. But I was getting feedback from ordinary people who found that the differences in personal style between John and Bill and Dave were noticeable,. It's hard to describe, but it was a bit of an aloofness. I remember wondering whether it was just a basic shyness, although with his MBA and his obvious competence in managing it was hard to see that shyness was one of his personality traits.

And yet, in my role as employee communications manager, and Editor of Measure, I did get this kind of feedback. They would compare John to Bill and Dave and there would be obvious contrasts that Bill and Dave would be far more accommodating and approachable. They just didn't think about John as being a management-by-walking-around manager. It is surely not my intention to criticize any such successful man for style, because he became known widely in the business community for his acumen. His reputation for integrity and good management skill was described in the book, "In Search of Excellence," the 1980s management bestseller by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman.

I can remember that John's relation with Packard became a worry for me, not that it was any of my business. But I can recall once being called out to Packard's home to talk about his HP Way book that I was editing. I went into his study and he said abruptly, "Do you know what John Young has done now?" I found it strangely unsettling, that John would have been aware of the situation and not work to smooth it out. So it appeared to me that although Packard recognized Young's competence in building the company, there were some unresolved issues as John moved ahead as CEO. I never went to John to feed back any of this information, although I possibly should have, and yet I didn't see it as my role.

I was a little surprised that John's secretary, Nancy Thoman, wouldn't have picked up on these employee comments, since she was a very competent secretary. John brought her along from his microwave division management days in the 60s. By the time John got started on his CEO years, Dave and Lucile were already working hard on their vision for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Dave was so intimately involved in the details of construction, and living part time at his home in Big Sur, to be close to Monterey, that he was probably just distracted. The Aquarium opened in 1984.

Regarding John's mental abilities, I remember that during an IEEE show in New York, several Citibank managers requested that Young come in and make a presentation on HP's situation. The bank owned a lot of HP stock so they wanted to hear from John to present the company prospects. Ed Van Bronkhorst put this meeting together with their high command. I'm not sure why he included me, but there were the three of us from HP, with a few of their Citibank top managers. They asked John to start off with his personal view of how the company was doing. John proceeded to talk for 30-40 minutes, without notes. It was an absolutely superlative review of where HP was.

You had to watch Young in a presentation like that to realize just how good he was. The facts would come out of his mouth in an absolutely perfect sequence; 1, 1a, 1b, 2, 2a, 2b, . . . His mind was so organized that his presentations really impressed the listeners. Moreover, he covered the basic facts from the point of view of the bankers, who were sitting there. He included the successes and the challenges and showed that he understood the exact concerns of bankers. He put himself into their position and then mentally structured his presentation to meet their expectations. As we were walking out, I told John that was the best review of HP I had ever heard. Van Bronkhorst was ecstatic because it put him in such a good light with this large financial institution.

John's manner could be intimidating. His mood was difficult to read. I can remember that if I knew I was going to need to see him in the morning, I would try to figure out if I wanted to try that day. Starting in the morning, I might read the situation as, "Boy today is a bad day, so I'm going to defer my meeting until tomorrow". I also remember that once I came in on a Monday morning, he had been at my desk and there was a note, "Kirby, cleanup this god damn desk." J. At this point, I'd like to observe that from my decades in industrial office environments, that there are two types of managers; the clean desk types and the cluttered desk types. John Young and Bill Terry and Dave Packard were the clean desk types. There was nothing on their desktops, and their inbox had very few papers in it. I was the cluttered desk type.

As John became CEO, HP had just started construction of the new headquarters Bldg. 20. This was a massive new structure built at the corner of Page Mill and Hanover, with the address 3000 Hanover. I think they chose that address to distinguish it from the previous corporate address of 1501 Page Mill Rd., which was adjacent just across the parking lot. Bldg. 20 was a very modern design that specifically did not use the sawtooth roof structure of the 1501 complex. Those peaked roofs always looked like a New England industrial structure to me, but yet they were ideal for directing sunlight down off of the roof, through the vertical windows, and reflecting off the inner ceiling to give a nice diffused light. It could be quite bright but it was facing North so the light was diffused.

Building 20 was built on four different levels A,B,C,D, and it was finished in construction and opened in the early 1980s. John moved all of the overhead functions of the company, several thousand jobs into the building including my own office. It made sense since he was the most important functional input to my corporate PR office. An interesting thing happened when one of the building facilities planning people was assigning the location of all the various offices, I was assigned to upper floor position that was way up the hill and a long way from the front lobby on Hanover. I have to credit Al Oliverio, who was attached to corporate marketing, for noting that my office location was in a terrible spot. I regularly dealt with media visitors, that would be coming to HP. Al was able to arrange my location on the second level essentially looking down on the main lobby and very convenient for media people coming to visit me.

Since John came out of the marketing function he had a really good feel for my job. I was afraid of him in some ways. He could be very nice but he could also be very tough. So I never knew which I was going to find. I always felt that the stress of being responsible for running a major corporation, with massive decisions on business and product strategies, could have been hard on him. This was a period in the computer world where we were making strides in taking over some of IBM's business. It was a very strategically-complex period. By that time Paul Ely had been reassigned to run the computer operation and was making strides on pulling it together.

I guess we will never know the exact basis of conflict of John and Dave. Both of these men had clear and strong visions of the future of technology and the challenges and opportunities, so you can understand some conflict, but to maintain a testy relationship for perhaps 10 years until John retired in 1992, seems like a sad decision. Then politics seems to have been a final straw. I think Young publically supported Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. I was told that by someone who was close to him. But I'm not positive of the fact, although it kind of makes some sense because he left HP right about that time. After that, Young served on President Bill Clinton's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology from 1993 to 2000, so he was already gone from HP and Packard. People I knew, who knew both of them agreed that John was in a really difficult personal situation. He should have had a right to his own politics and yet Packard was a staunch strident Republican.

For me, John was an enigma. I could paraphrase Winston Churchill's quotation, "He is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma". I think John's relation with Bill Hewlett, in contrast, was much better, even though Bill had left active management some years before as his health was deteriorating. There wasn't much reason for an interrelation between Young and Hewlett in the 1980s.

Young and Dean Morton worked together really well. Dean had returned from his management of the HP Medical Group and became the Chief Operating Officer, COO, under John. Dean was a Harvard MBA and John of course was Stanford MBA, so they both really understood the functionalities of top management. That relationship went on for years, until John retired, then they shared an off-site office in Los Altos.

My Years in HP Corporate PR, by Dave Kirby

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