Meg Whitman is trying to save Hewlett-Packard, a once and glorious high-tech company. HP has been in trouble for nearly a decade. So far, the remedies tried have involved improving efficiencies–firing over 30,000 people, outsourcing production, flattening that old pyramid. It’s time to try something different–reigniting HP’s creativity.
In my book, Creative Intelligence, I bring together a panel of former HP engineers who talk about their incredibly creative early years at HP–and how it ended. They describe the labs–which I call “magic circles”–where researchers explored all kinds of things without much restrictions–and the GMs who came by to screen the new ideas, curate them and then provide the resources to scale creativity into creation. I call them the “wanderers.” The founders of HP, Mrs. Hewlett and Packard managed their company by wandering around.
The magic circles of labs (play-grounds really) linked to wanderers who scaled generated organic innovation for HP. The company created new scientific instruments, ink-jet printers, computers–a panoply of new products coming out of the creativity of its engineers and researchers and then scaled by skillful brokers of corporate resources.
It ended when the GMs, who were often engineers themselves, were replaced by the biz dev guys. It ended when deep knowledge about science and experienced intuition about chances of success were replaced by wanderers who were business people using numbers to make decisions. It ended when HP started to fire the bottom 5% of employees every year to “improve” its human capital–destroying the trust among colleagues needed to play, try things out, take risks, fail and go on without repercussions. That ended the creation of exciting new products with fat profit margins for HP (the last was HALO, that wonderful conferencing technology, that HP never developed and sold off).
Organic innovation is what HP needs now. It has failed to buy innovation in its many purchases of companies. It has failed to turn around by promoting more efficiency. Its time for creativity. The example of HP in its heyday provides the narrative for #5 of my Creative Competencies–Pivoting/Scaling. It’s what Meg Whitman needs to do.
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