Foreword

The Santa Rosa Experience -- Steve Fossi

In the Golden Years of High Tech, following the war-winning success of electronics in WWII, Hewlett Packard Company began its long rise to become one of the world's largest and most respected organizations. The product line, born with the HP 200A Audio Oscillator of 1939, was dedicated to electronic measurement instrumentation. From 1945 onward, it remained instruments and data acquisition, until the introduction of the HP 2116A Instrument Computer in 1966 and the HP 9100A Desktop Computer in 1968. One corporate acquisition of Sanborn Medical Corp of Waltham, MA did begin a separate line of medical products. This was probably the personal decision of Bill Hewlett, whose family had a distinguished medical lineage and genealogy.

In the electronic instrumentation, which was separated into divisions in 1962, there was no more successful product line than the Radio Frequency, (RF)/Microwave Division. The technology was spawned out of WWII, and creatively expanded by some microwave engineers who were recruited out of the wartime development labs. From 1962 to 1969, while the average HP corporate growth rate was about 15% per year, doubling every 5 years, the Microwave Division grew from $20 million revenues to $75 million, or tripling in that same period. The dependable company-wide revenue growth spurred more building and recruitment. More importantly, it led to the executive decisions to move to new cities, Loveland and Colorado Springs, Colorado.

We used to congratulate ourselves by adopting the concept that HP sold more than electronic hardware. We sold MEASUREMENTS. It followed the age-old sales seminar technique which proclaimed that when you went to the local hardware store to buy a 1/4 inch drill bit, what you actually needed was a 1/4th inch HOLE. So, in a real sense, Hewlett Packard invented entirely new measurement techniques to go along with the new instrument hardware. Thus, in the 1960s our microwave product lines proceeded into two dramatic new measurement functions, Spectrum Analyzer measurements and Network Analyzer measurements. These two new product lines quickly pushed microwave sales to the $100 million mark, and by 1970 plans were underway for sending half of the division line to Santa Rosa, in a new Fountaingrove facility campus.

As we will see in this memoir of Steve Fossi's HP career, his life experience is basically the same as perhaps a thousand other young men and women who graduated with engineering or MBA degrees and were recruited to join HP across the world. In my 1960s years as Marketing Manager of the Microwave Division, I tended to use the military metaphor for our organizational strategy. Brand new graduate engineers were considered 2nd Lieutenants, MS or MBA degrees might qualify as 1st lieutenants. Organizationally all our three main functional departments, engineering, marketing and manufacturing were divided into product teams. So a new instrument design team in the lab might have from 5 engineers and upward. Thus the Lab Project Manager was equivalent to a military Captain and the Lab Section Manager might be equivalent to a Major.

The military metaphor worked well in encouraging team building, brand new engineers were immediately assigned design work under the mentorship of experienced (but not necessarily much older) engineers. But with regard to creativity and self-motivation the military metaphor did not apply. The HP Way provided one key rule, Management by Objective, meaning that design orders did not come from the top, but were devised by the team as they went through their project timing. Steve's memoir does a great job expressing how he moved into this well-honed work culture, how his project work was mentored and monitored and enlarged.

In Marketing teams, legendary mentors like Blake Peterson took the fledglings under their wings, for both the technical lookup procedures as well as the Factory Expert telephone etiquette. Often these senior personnel might have Navy Chief experience in their past, so they might appear gruff and grumpy. Names like Dave Widman and Cliff Jones and George Springer would bring smiles to the faces of old Field Engineers, who knew that a call to any of those senior experts would likely as not, bring a technical answer off the top of their heads, without waiting for a callback. This could be extremely valuable if the call were coming from the desk of a customer, who was making a last minute buying decision.

So the work culture of the HP Way was passed on day by day. One value of the bull-pen arrangement of desks was that the neophyte engineer was usually sitting next to his manager, so telephone calls were overheard by all. How does your manager handle a confronting issue with manufacturing deliveries? How does a senior design engineer handle technical calls from vendors who are negotiating specifications and quantity price decisions? In some cases that I recall, you even learned something about a man's home life, if he chose to talk to people from home on his desk phone.

Buttressing this strategic plan to hire our engineering staffs mostly from BS degree graduates across the nation was a brilliant recruiting program. It was a massive investment with literally hundreds of our technical staff involved. I never saw actual numbers, but as a guess, we probably had teams for 100+ colleges. Their objective was to establish and maintain VERY close relations to the key professors. This might be done with instrument donations and other personal support such as lecture visits to classrooms. What we got out of that was the identification of top candidates. This all led to on-campus interviews and offers for travel to factory visits. It goes without saying that that the factory interview teams who used up the whole day, started with a team member picking up the candidate for breakfast. At least one interviewer would handle the high pressure technical inquisition, and the rest acted like sales people, working for an acceptance for the right identified winner candidates. Usually the team met for an up/down vote before the visitor left the plant, such that the team member who drove the young person back to the airport could make a job offer on the way.

Typically the leading new engineers would be ready for promotion to team leader within 5 years. There was considerable evidence that engineers who encouraged internal movement from marketing to production or lab to marketing often made the best promotional candidates, obviously with their improved functional experiences. You will learn from Steve's story that promotions and suggestions for moves to outposts like European offices came unexpectedly. With the magnificent new RF/MW instrument products of the late 1970s and early 1980's being built for functionality using internal microprocessors, the measurement capability multiplied significantly. Enormous computational power now resided within an instrument, without the need for control by an external computer.

But threaded through Steve's story we can see how the product teams learned to manage product strategy, what does the customer need-years before the customer KNEW they needed it. They learned how to anticipate what communications technology would be doing to the mobile telephone and the cellular base station installations. More importantly you will see how the management needed to get their organizations properly separated in product divisions, and work out conflicts on research budget funding. Yes, even with HP's terrific work culture, there were territorial product line wars at the management level.

Things became serious with the major corporate decision to spin off the instrumentation product lines from the completely different consumer lines of printers and personal and commercial computers. This led to the formation of Agilent which assumed the chemical and electronic lines. It all happened at the turn of the century, and Agilent began with enormous production backlogs of orders, in Steve's case the remarkable success of the visionary automatic tests systems. They had cleverly been able to exploit the functional measurement power to customize test systems for specialized markets such as antenna pattern testing and production test for the tiny sophisticated radio frequency components needed in new generations of cell phones.

But the bursting of the first Internet "bubble" left Agilent with a large excess of personnel. Some of Steve's worst times were in the realization of the terrible decision for large personnel layoffs. The HP Way didn't really provide for that, it was wrenching. His personal turmoil and that of other managers shows through. At other times, his willingness to call in outside consulting for resolving major organizational decisions, given major HP executive personalities is also revealing.

This memoir is going to give you an inside look at the most challenging side of management. Well worth the read. You will learn it is not all about the corner office, first class airline travel, and nice bonuses.

John Minck

HP Memories

This memory of PERSON_NAME's career at hp results from the work of the www.hpmemoryproject.org website of Marc Mislanghe, who with John Minck edited and published the original archive of Memoirs. After Marc's untimely death in 2014, Ken Kuhn has now assumed the custodianship with John, and together they will continue to expand the Memoirs section.

One of the main objectives in starting this website in 2011 was (and still is today) to get in touch with people who have worked at hp from the birth of the company up to today. We are interested in hearing your memories no matter what division or country you worked in, or whether you were in engineering, marketing, finance, administration, or worked in a factory. This is because all of you have contributed to the story of this unique and successful enterprise.

Your memories are treasure for this website. While product and technology are our main concern, other writings related to the company life are highly welcome, as far as they stay inside the hp Way guidelines.

Anybody Else? Please get in touch by emailing the webmaster on the Contact US link at http://www.hpmemoryproject.org