Silicon Valley has given birth to a number of legendary companies but even among those, Hewlett-Packard (HP) is considered something special. The founders — David Packard and William Hewlett — have been role models for successive generations of high tech entrepreneurs. The multi-billion dollar enterprise that started life in a garage inspired several generations of future start-ups, including Apple and Google, to name just two. The much-vaunted “HP Way” — from the firm’s obsession with elegant technological solutions to the management innovations that were several generations ahead of their time —has been the subject of numerous books and magazine articles. That’s why writing yet another book on HP’s history is a challenge. First, the author needs to ensure that he has enough new material to surprise and interest readers. Then he has to spin the material into a readable tale.
Michael Malone manages to do both even though his latest book will inevitably be compared with David Packard’s own book, The HP Way: How
Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company. The sheer amount of research that has gone into the book is its great advantage but it never burdens the tale of the two great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. It keeps reader interest throughout. You only have to compare Malone’s offering with that of Richard Tedlow’s Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American to realise that. Tedlow did equally good research on an equally remarkable subject but he ended up writing a worthy but dull book.
Remarkably, Malone has also managed to avoid a hagiography (by a whisker). In fact, it appears to have been a struggle for him to remain objective when his instinct is to be unabashedly admiring.
Malone knows how to spin a crackling good story. He starts off with the first meeting of the young Hewlett and the young Packard at the annual tryouts for the Stanford University Football team. The two men were poles apart in many ways. Dave Packard stood six foot five, was a natural athlete who shone in track events, basketball, football and almost any sport he touched, and was a bonafide genius in academics to boot. William Hewlett was short, stocky and had no hopes of ever getting into the football team he was trying out for. He was also dyslexic (though that term had not yet been invented) who made it to Stanford only because of family connections. The fact that Hewlett was a mechanical genius and an engineer’s engineer had not yet been discovered.
Having set the stage, Malone then delves into their childhood, which had remarkable similarities. Both boys fooled around with explosives and had near fatal accidents. Malone also weaves in the other characters who would play significant roles in the Hewlett-Packard/ Stanford University/ Silicon Valley stories. These include Fred Terman, a generation older than Hewlett and Packard, who would be a professor in Stanford one day and would mentor the two boys. (Incidentally, Fred Terman’s father, who was also a professor at Stanford, was the inventor of the IQ test.) It also included Lee De Forest, the genius who invented the electronic amplifier, Charles Litton, a maverick engineer and scientist who went on to create Litton Industries, and who helped keep Packard and Hewlett afloat when they had no money.
There was also the remarkable Russ Varian who spent his years in Stanford living on the fruits he foraged from the campus trees to save money. Varian and his brothers invented the Klystron, which would form the heart of everything from microwave ovens to cellphones to the radar.
Stanford University was home to a generation of remarkable young people who were enterprising, curious and wanted to conquer the world. They formed warm bonds that were to last their lifetimes. Though Hewlett and Packard created one of the greatest companies in the US, they were not the only stars of that era. In fact, a large measure of their success depended on the other remarkable young men they were interacting with. The most interesting point about those times was that even though several of Dave and Bill’s contemporaries set up their own companies, and were even rivals in the marketplace, they never hesitated to help out HP. And Dave and Bill returned the favour.
MICHAEL S. MALONE is one of America’s most distinguished technology journalists. Formerly editor of Forbes ASAP and currently a popular Web columnist for ABC, he has written for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Wired and Fast Company magazines. Among his books are The Big Score, The Virtual Corporation, Infinite Loop, and Intellectual Capital
The other point that comes across very strongly is that the entrepreneurs who formed the first generation of Silicon Valley were very different from the current generation of Valley entrepreneurs. Having lived through the Depression, they were extremely conservative when it came to finances. They had their own rudimentary form of angel funding, but did not have the support of either the sophisticated venture capitalists or over-eager stockmarkets in love with tech companies. The other point that emerges is the male chauvinism of that era. Lucille Packard and Flora Hewlett were highly intelligent women but had to content themselves with playing supporting roles as housewives.
Malone recounts the Bill and Dave story with a great number of anecdotes and humorous sidelights. You learn how the Packard kitchen oven played a huge role in the first product HP started selling. (It was used to bake the box in which the product was packaged.) Malone also explores in detail the genesis of such management practices as flexi time and profit sharing that were pioneered by HP.
Predictably, Carly Fiorina’s hiring and leadership (or lack of it) is treated quite critically by Malone, who makes no bones about the fact that she was the antithesis of everything Hewlett and Packard stood for. Indeed, all the CEOs and leaders who followed Bill and Dave come out quite poorly in the book. That is partly because the comparisons are unfair — it would be hard for anyone to fill their shoes.
The one thing that mars the book is the poor quality of editing and proofing. A book this well researched and written surely deserved better.
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If ever there was a sanctimonious people, it is Indians. We are outraged by South Africa’s apartheid, we sneer about the way the Americans treat their Black population, talk disparagingly about the rich Gulf Arabs who fawn over the White expatriate, while treating the Browns and Blacks with disdain. But our smugness is unassailable. Seldom, if ever, do Indians stop to think about the way they have legitimised the most obnoxious and most indefensible system of discrimination anywhere in the world — untouchability, or the practice of social exclusion based on caste. Nor will they admit that it is a convenient system for allowing the few to exploit a large majority economically.
