Summative Case Study HP
Summative Case Study 3 - Hewlett-Packard
At Hewlett-Packard, where the MBWA theory was practiced, executives were encouraged to be out of their offices working on building relationships, motivating, and keeping direct touch with the activities of the company. The practice of MBWA at all levels of the company reflects a commitment to keep up to date with individuals and activities through impromptu discussions, "coffee talks", communication lunches, and the like.
In the early days of Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett devised an active management style that they called Management By Walking Around (MBWA).
Senior HP managers were seldom at their desks. They spent most of their days visiting employees, customers, and suppliers. This direct contact with key people provided them with a solid grounding from which viable strategies could be crafted.
Before Palo Alto's punky garage band the Donnas, the myth of the garage was established by William Hewlett and David Packard, (Master Strategists) founding a company building electronic test and measurement equipment on $500 capital.
These two smart fellows five years out of Stanford, established Hewlett-Packard Corporation and won the bid for an audio oscillator to test the sound equipment for Walt Disney's "Fantasia", and their fantasia became reality.
Their company's 1968 Hewlett-Packard 9100A was the first personal computer, but they marketed it as a "desktop calculator" so as not to evoke images of IBM. They developed the laser printer, the single unit printer/copier/scanner/FAXer, and a bunch of other stuff.
In the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, their Ohio office shipped militarily useful tech to Iraq. By 2000, a series of corporate buyouts and acquisitions made H-P the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers.
The garage myth was re-energized (and craftily exploited) by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the 1970s. In my 1991 muralized interactive kiosk "Collaborationation" I limned the
At Hewlett-Packard, where the MBWA theory was practiced, executives were encouraged to be out of their offices working on building relationships, motivating, and keeping direct touch with the activities of the company. The practice of MBWA at all levels of the company reflects a commitment to keep up to date with individuals and activities through impromptu discussions, "coffee talks", communication lunches, and the like.
In the early days of Hewlett-Packard (HP), Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett devised an active management style that they called Management By Walking Around (MBWA).
Senior HP managers were seldom at their desks. They spent most of their days visiting employees, customers, and suppliers. This direct contact with key people provided them with a solid grounding from which viable strategies could be crafted.
Before Palo Alto's punky garage band the Donnas, the myth of the garage was established by William Hewlett and David Packard, (Master Strategists) founding a company building electronic test and measurement equipment on $500 capital.
These two smart fellows five years out of Stanford, established Hewlett-Packard Corporation and won the bid for an audio oscillator to test the sound equipment for Walt Disney's "Fantasia", and their fantasia became reality.
Their company's 1968 Hewlett-Packard 9100A was the first personal computer, but they marketed it as a "desktop calculator" so as not to evoke images of IBM. They developed the laser printer, the single unit printer/copier/scanner/FAXer, and a bunch of other stuff.
In the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, their Ohio office shipped militarily useful tech to Iraq. By 2000, a series of corporate buyouts and acquisitions made H-P the world's largest manufacturer of personal computers.
The garage myth was re-energized (and craftily exploited) by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in the 1970s. In my 1991 muralized interactive kiosk "Collaborationation" I limned the