Memo to Meg Whitman: 4 Tips for Tackling HP
Dear Meg:
Becoming CEO of Hewlett-Packard is almost as big a deal as being Governor of California (your previous aspiration) — and just as political.
As the joke goes, should your friends offer you congratulations or condolences? There’s no time for either. You must get right to work. Here are four things you’re up against, followed by four tips that every newly-anointed leader should heed. First, the issues:
HP’s once-admired culture is gone, gone, gone. HP always had great people and still does. But HP is no longer a values-driven, family-like, innovation-oriented company that inspires commitment. It’s a safe bet that resumes are already in play.
HP Invent is an empty slogan. R&D has been starved at HP for years, and it will be hard to pull enough irons out of the fire to propel organic growth. A technology company without strong internal innovation capabilities is a company on the verge of disappearing.
HP is a decade behind IBM in business model change. Compared to HP’s situation, IBM’s transformation was a walk in the park. IBM’s shift to software and services occurred in the 1990s. The PC division was sold in 2005. IBM traded being the biggest for being consistently high performing. I studied IBM and HP (and your former company, eBay) for my 2001 book, Evolve. By then IBM had successfully completed a major transformation and was headed for Web 2.0 and smooth succession to a new CEO in 2002, while continuing an innovation thrust that included grid technologies, cloud computing, and supercomputing. HP, though strong, was often out-hustled by Sun in getting new solutions to customers — and even Sun couldn’t survive independently in a consolidating industry. Back then, HP was about to swallow Compaq, which still had indigestion over its own acquisition of DEC, and HP would come to
