Losing the HP Way
Hewlett Packard was different from other Silicon Valley companies and always a leader. By the time I met Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in the late 1970s they were nearing retirement but still active and I knew them, working occasionally for both men and for their respective foundations.
Context & Ripple Effects
This column lands at the end of a stretch in which Hewlett-Packard's identity had been openly debated: Fortune profiled Mark Hurd's moment in March 2009, and weeks later the New York Times asked whether H.P. needed a dose of anarchy to shake off its drift. Both treated HP as a great company with a strategy problem.
Cringely reframes that debate as a culture problem rather than a strategy one. Writing from personal acquaintance with Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in their late-1970s years — still active even as they neared retirement — he argues the 'HP Way' that distinguished HP from every other Silicon Valley company has been lost, which matters because that culture was the through-line behind its long run as an industry leader.
First-order effects
- HP's board and executive team face a recruitment and retention problem: the founding-values culture that once differentiated HP as an employer is gone, so the company competes for talent on the same terms as every other Valley firm.
Second-order effects
- With the cultural moat eroded, HP's strategic choices fall entirely to professional management and the board — the same leadership whose direction the 2009 coverage was already questioning — raising the stakes on each portfolio decision.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, founder-defined values cultures across Silicon Valley give way to financially managed conglomerates, and 'company way' identities survive only where founders or their direct heirs still hold power.
The trend: Silicon Valley's founder-culture companies are being absorbed into conventionally managed corporations, trading distinctive internal cultures for portfolio logic.