Hewlett Packard Enterprise

In its heyday, up until around 2006, HP was THE place to work. "The HP Way" was that management's job was to tell their people what the objective was, then "let them loose" to accomplish it.

And it worked, exceedingly well. Management was there to provide support and enable their people. "Micro-management" didn't exist at HP. People felt proud to contribute, to "break rules" if needed, and innovation was a "given."

Bill & Dave treated everyone as a friend or family. This type of management was unheard of back when HP was just beginning, and at the time other CEOs literally laughed at their business model.

They stopped laughing very quickly, but found it difficult to become "Another HP." It takes very unique skills that the founders were blessed with.

However, eventually Bill & Dave passed on, and we brought in a CEO who outright disliked everything HP was. (One example: HP had "profit sharing," and we had a good year, and the rewards were quite good. The new CEO was angry at "having" to spend those monies on people and rushed to make profit sharing a thing of the past.) We also purchased, in an attempt to "be bigger," a company that also didn't fit the HP Way model. From there, the company changed almost overnight. The change took away what was truly a unique company and replaced it with becoming just another cold, even heartless one.

I left HP as a result, as did most of my coworkers. The HP I left had promised me my job back, and I followed up only to find they had a "policy change," and once you left, you were not welcomed back. Instead, they hired new people, people who know nothing about the old HP and assumed all companies were the same. Job security was always a concern, rewards were rare, and you felt "disposable."

My heart breaks to see such a miracle disappear.

My title here, "It's not HP anymore," was something a friend who stayed said. When she heard I was thinking of coming back, she said I shouldn't, and she too wished she had left but was getting closer to retiring.

But like most of us "Old timers," seeing what happened to HP is, in a word, painful.

Watch (at least) one documentary. I suggest "HP Origins." It does a very good job explaining how HP started, about Bill & Dave, and primarily, what "The HP Way" truly is. It's well worth the half hour. Good luck to all.