Greeley Hard Copy

1. Describe the HP organizational Culture. What are some implications of this culture for developing new innovations? What is evidence of R&D’s dominance in HP? The HP organizational culture revolved around the “HP Way,” which strongly stressed consensus decision-making. While this had worked in many ways for HP in the past, this type of culture created its share of problems. Because GHC’s business is technology-driven, the culture was dominated by R&D. While the company was making the sift to give other functional areas more input as markets began to shift towards business and consumer users, the consensus decision-making culture made this a hard task. Even when there were disagreements, multifunctional teams would gravitate towards the R&D perspective just to avoid conflict and come to a unified consensus. The R&D prospective was usually chosen because of the left-over vestiges of R&D dominance. Because of this, upper management did not always know about the disagreements. Another characteristic of the culture is the pressure to hit a “home run,” especially when developing a new product.
Evidence of the R&D dominance at HP can be seen with the swipe technology. The creation of this technology alone by the R&D department at HP Labs has created demand within the company for a product that can utilize this new technology. Where a more marketing-oriented organization may look at the customer needs first and then turn to the R&D department to develop a product that fits those needs, an R&D-oriented organization like HP develops new technologies first, and then tries to find a market for the technology. Another piece of evidence that points to R&D dominance is the fact that Carau finally developed a Lobo prototype without needing a backpack to hold all of the electronics, but John Stedman seemed to be more interested in the new swipe technology.
Implications of this type of organizational culture can be seen