The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation (review)
暂无分享,去创建一个
Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price, The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation, Stanford University Press, 2009, 638 pp. Hewlett-Packard is one of the most important, yet least documented of the information technology giants. It is commonly cited as the company that gave birth to Silicon Valley—it certainly contributed massively to the region’s early and continuing development. While boardroom scandals and high-profile firings of its chief executives have dominated headlines recently, for years, HP has been the largest computer corporation in the world, the leading printer manufacturer, and more recently, the top revenue producer in the computer server industry. Charles House and Raymond Price’s The HP Phenomenon is by far the most substantial book on the history of Hewlett-Packard to date. It provides extensive documentation on and insight into this influential hightech corporation. As its subtitle indicates, the book focuses on the dual themes of innovation and business transformation. HP, like IBM, is a rare high-tech corporation that successfully transitioned into numerous new product areas and businesses over many decades. Also common to both corporations were strong, longtime leaders who created pervasive, but very different corporate cultures (Thomas J. Watson, Sr. for IBM and David Packard and William Hewlett for HP) during their respective firms’ formative decades. Watson, Sr.’s IBM was hierarchical and highly regimented, whereas Hewlett and Packard emphasized more of a decentralized, egalitarian, teamwork-based culture that became widely known as the ‘‘HP way.’’ This term, which gained further currency following the publication David Packard’s engaging memoir (The HP Way) of his and his business partner’s founding and leadership of the company, has recently come under attack in both articles and books that suggest the HP way might have been lost amid recent scandals and rapidly changing managerial regimes. House and Price address this issue at the beginning and in the latter portions of their book—remaining optimistic, but presenting it as an open question that only time will be able to answer. Throughout the book, the HP way is heralded as the key to HP’s innovative environment, and although the extensive discussion of corporate culture is welcome, the HP way unfortunately often comes across as an all-pervasive omnipresent force rather than an object of analysis. Price and House, both former managers at HP, do a particularly strong job of detailing the different technologies and business throughout the firm’s sevendecade history. Although their years at HP provide perspective and obviously produced critical connections making this book possible, to its credit, it is carefully researched throughout and not dominated by the authors’ firsthand perspectives. Though the authors’ celebratory editorializing creeps in from time to time, particularly in comparisons to competitor IBM, thankfully it does not overwhelm this useful and highly readable book. In many respects, the book resembles Emerson Pugh’s excellent survey Building IBM—another insider, engineer/manager-produced historical survey—but The HP Phenomena differs in that it was not the outgrowth of a company-sponsored historical research project. (Pugh’s book grew out of IBM’s Technical History Project of the 1980s.) Despite being neither companyorganized, nor company-endorsed, former CEO Carleton (Carly) Fiorina gave Price and House full access to HP’s extensive, and generally closed, corporate archive, enabling the book’s depth and detail. The authors also conducted many interviews for the book, and they carefully document sources in the book’s 60 pages of endnotes. The book’s greatest success is its balance in covering different eras of HP—from HP’s audio oscillators and voltmeters in the early 1940s, through its entrance into computing in the second half of the 1960s, to its thriving server business in the 21st century. The authors accurately point out that the history of computer peripherals have remained quite peripheral to historical literature. Their chapter ‘‘Marks on Paper’’ on the emergence and evolution of HP’s printer business is a particularly welcome contribution to the history of computing. HP’s recent focus on IT services as one of its primary businesses, following its important acquisition of services giant Electronic Data Systems in 2008, is not covered—although this is not surprising given the book’s publication date a mere one year later. With neither author being a historian, it is also not surprising that the occasional statement on existing historical literature represents the only effort to connect to historiography in the history of computing, the history of technology, business history, or organizational history. The authors do a bit more in connecting to the managerial literature, but even here most management scholars will find the discussion superficial and somewhat wanting. Clearly, an opportunity was lost to more fully engage the managerial literature on innovation, agglomeration in Silicon Valley, or organizational structure and change—particularly since Price is now an academic (in human behavior in engineering) and it is published by one of the leading business school presses. [3B2-9] man2011040081.3d 3/11/011 17:11 Page 81
[1] Emerson W. Pugh. Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology , 1995 .
[2] Karen Lewis,et al. The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company , 1995 .