Tony Kortens said:
>Interestingly I was re-reading some of Built to Last yesterday and Dave
>Packard is quoted saying that the thing he was most proud of "making" was
>the company design - its philosophy- (the HP way) and that the products
>happened along almost opportunistically. Whether this is somewhat poetic
>I don't know? In your QMS you discussed did you ever corrrelate to "fit"
>with HP way?
Yes, I think it would be fair to say that what Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett
built was an organization that is, in effect, a process for continuously
changing so that it creates "contributions" in its fields of interest
(currently MC^2, measurement, computation, and communication).
Their "result" was the "process" that is HP.
On the other hand, a major element of that process definition are the HP
Corporate Objectives. The first one of those is very much results oriented:
1. Profit; To achieve sufficient profit to finance our company growth and
to provide the resources we need to achieve our other corporate objectives.
(fyi, the other objectives are customers, fields of interest, growth, our
people, management, and citizenship.)
The Quality Maturity System reviews don't explicitly check for use of the HP
Way. It's presence is assumed and would be remarkable only by its absence.
I've participated in over 50 reviews in all parts of the HP organization in
all parts of the world, and I've commented on culture issues only in one
review, of a group that had been recently acquired. We often see issues
that could be interpreted as HP Way problems, but the issues are almost
always situational and caused by well-intended decisions. Those become
great learning experiences.
Joe
joe_podolsky@hp.com
--JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
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