HP History: 1939-1992 - Creating a Great Company

In 1992, HP was a highly respected leader in the electronics industry. Founded in 1939 by Bill Hewitt and Dave Packard, HP became a model for well-run companies that treat employees, customers, and suppliers, and shareholders well.

I had always thought that HP might be a good place to work "some day." Many of the people I knew in 1992 worked there or had worked there. It was considered a truly great place to work, and it was a fixture in Corvallis. As things wound down at Acumen, I was glad to find a home at HP. I'll write more about my own personal experience at HP later.

The official HP history site is a great source of information. The HP Alumni Association also has an interesting collection of sources about HP's history.

One side of HP that was well known around the world was The HP Way. The version in 1992 included these main points:

• We have trust and respect for individuals.
• We focus on a high level of achievement and contribution. 
• We conduct our business with uncompromising integrity.
• We achieve our common objectives through teamwork.
• We encourage flexibility and innovation.     

HP's corporate objectives were also well known and respected:

1. Profit. To recognize that profit is the best single measure of our contribution to society and the ultimate source of our corporate strength. We should attempt to achieve the maximum possible profit consistent with our other objectives.

2. Customers. To strive for continual improvement in the quality, usefulness, and value of the products and services we offer our customers.

3. Field of Interest. To concentrate our efforts, continually seeking new opportunities for growth but limiting our involvement to fields in which we have capability and can make a contribution.

4. Growth. To emphasize growth as a measure of strength and a requirement for survival.

5. Employees. To provide employment opportunities for HP people that include the opportunity to share in the company's success, which they help make possible. To provide for them job security based on performance, and to provide the opportunity for personal satisfaction that comes from a sense of accomplishment in their work.

6. Organization. To maintain an organizational environment that fosters individual motivation, initiative and creativity, and a wide latitude of freedom in working toward established objectives and goals.

7. Citizenship. To meet the obligations of good citizenship by making contributions to the community and to the institutions in our society which generate the environment in which we operate.

 
Forbes magazine wrote this about the early days of HP:

"The (HP) garage, ... tucked behind an arts and crafts bungalow on a quiet avenue in Palo Alto, is easily the most famous garage in the world. It is also the birthplace of Silicon Valley--and thus of the electronics revolution. It was in the downstairs apartment of this bungalow that newlyweds David and Lucile Packard lived in 1939.

Packard had recently returned from a job in the East on the invitation of his old Stanford professor Fred Terman. Terman had promised to find Packard work in some of the local instrument companies, like that of Cy Elwell, who were busily making vacuum tubes. Packard had also hooked up with an old classmate, Bill Hewlett, and during their free hours the two men would knock around in the garage trying to come up with product ideas for their own company. Most of the ideas were pretty marginal--like automatic bowling-pin resetters--but in time the pair settled on a winner: an audio oscillator based on one of Hewlett's old college designs.

The pair built the devices in the garage while Lucile used the kitchen stove to bake the paint on the surface of sheet-metal casings. The trio struggled and starved--and nearly gave up--when an unexpected order arrived from Walt Disney Co. studio, then making Fantasia, for eight oscillators. Hewlett-Packard was on its way. Bill and Dave packed up their tools, moved out of the garage and set up business in a redwood office building a few blocks away. They never looked back.

End of story. Sort of. As it turned out, Bill and Dave proved to be among the greatest and most influential businessmen of the 20th century. Their innovations as managers--profit sharing, flex-time, management by objective, the "HP Way"--transformed modern industry. And their company, now the third-largest tech firm on the planet, may be the most consistently admired commercial enterprise ever built.

It's not surprising, then, that by the mid-1960s the old Addison Avenue garage began to take on a mythic glow. I remember, as an HP employee in the late 1970s, taking a lunch hour to drive by the place as if it were Lourdes."

As I began my HP career in 1992, I felt the same emotion. This was going to be a great place to be for a few years.

Next: HP History: 1939-1992 - Bill and Dave and John Young