2012: EER and Goodbye

The rumors were flying in early 2012 about a possible Enhanced Early Retirement (EER) program. We were already seeing increased workforce reductions (WFR), and we were hearing rumors of many more WFR's to come in 2012. HP's revenue and profit were dropping, and the future did not look good. Meg was telling Wall Street that HP would turn around but that it would take a few years.

Shane Robison had retired from HP near the end of 2011, and Meg decided not to replace him. That was a significant shock to those of us in the CTO community. It effectively brought an end to the CTO era at HP. There would no longer be a strong central leader, and the various CTOs were assigned to the EVPs of HP's main business units.

In March, VJ suddenly retired from HP. Meg merged IPG into Todd Bradley's PSG PC business. Todd promptly moved the IPG and PSG CTOs (and the rest of us) down a level in the HP hierarchy. The merging was a huge shock to everyone in IPG and signaled the end of innovation in IPG.

When Patrick Scaglia retired from HP in April of 2012 after having tried to help create a strong new business as the HP Cloud Services CTO, it sent another strong signal about the future of HP's technology leadership. Prith Banerjee also left HP in April. HP Labs had no leader.

By this point, all of my HP mentors were gone. I learned the details of the official EER program while I was working on the R&D portfolio in Porto Alegre on 22 May. By taking HP's early retirement offer, I would get a year of salary added to my HP pension (tax free!) and would be able to stay on the HP medical insurance plan at employee rates for two years. After that, I could move at any time to the HP retiree medical plan.

Needless to say, I took the early retirement package without thinking twice about it.

Within a very short time, I was hired to join the faculty in the College of Business at Oregon State University. I begin teaching in the MBA program in September.

During my 20 years at HP, I took 437 trips and 1535 flights for HP, flew about 1,929,103 miles, and spent about 178.6 days in the air. That's 1.3% of my adult life in the air for HP and 2.5% of my lifetime while working at HP. The good side of all this travel is that I was able to visit all of these countries: USA, Canada, France, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, England, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Hungary, Singapore, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Australia, Portugal, Finland, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, and Brasil. I will miss the international travel.

It isn't very hard to say "Goodbye" to what remains of HP. After 20 years working with great colleagues on innovation challenges, it is time for change again. I receive my gold badge this week. My last day on the HP payroll is this Friday, 31 August. I will forever belong to a great HP Retiree club.

This feels very good!