/ciol/media/agency_attachments/c0E28gS06GM3VmrXNw5G.png)
Follow UsWilliam Hewlett, one of the last original Silicon Valley high-tech pioneers
died peacefully in his sleep Friday morning at the age of 87. Life-long partner
David Packard passed away in 1996.
The two founded Hewlett-Packard in a small garage in Palo Alto in 1938 with
just $538, an investment they lived to see flourish into a $50 billion-a-year
global computer and electronics gear giant.
More important to both men than the incredible corporate success and personal
wealth they acquired, HP became one of the most revered and respected companies
in the world. "The HP Way" corporate culture they defined and
instilled in their workforce remains unequaled.
The HP Way embellished the founders' basic beliefs about managing a company:
disdain of strict hierarchy and formality, admiration for individual creativity
and initiative, and trust in employees. It also includes concepts such as
respect for the individual, contribution to the customer and the community,
integrity, teamwork and innovation.
''I guess that's what I'm most proud of is that we really created a way to
work with employees, let them share in the profits and still keep control of it.
When I was born there was no money, so we said we don't want to borrow money.
People who'd borrowed money had gotten into trouble. We also said we did not
want to run a hire-and-fire operation, but rather a company based on a loyal and
dedicated work force,'' Hewlett said in an interview published earlier on the
Web site of the San Jose Tech Museum he and Packard helped fund.
Apple Computer was inspired by The HP Way, said founder Steve Jobs, who got a
summer job at Hewlett-Packard after calling Bill Hewlett at home. "What I
learned that summer at Bill and Dave's company was the blueprint we used for
Apple. Today marks the passing of their era, but their spirit lives on in every
company in this valley."
One legend has it that Hewlett was walking through the engineering lab one
day and came across a locked tool cabinet. Hewlett cut open the lock and vowed
he never again wanted to see the tools employees needed to do their jobs locked
up.
The number of stories about Hewlett showing up to help ordinary engineers
figure out the problems they were trying to solve is endless. "Bill had a
great reputation for walking into a junior engineer's office, putting his feet
up on the desk and saying, `Tell me what you're doing, tell me what we should be
doing,' '' said Jerry Porras, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of
Business.
The HP Way is not unchanged. During the 1990s the HP Way suffered much
erosion. As Packard put it once, "The problem with the HP Way is it can
mean anything people want it to mean."
In December 1999, HP's new CEO and Chairwoman Carly Fiorina rewrote the HP
Way into a doctrine called "The Rules of the Garage.'' Fiorina wanted HP's
workers to return to the spirit of how Hewlett and Packard founded the company.
"The HP Way had come to mean a set of bad habits -- for example, being
slow. In the '90s it came to mean, `We can't do anything unless we all
agree'," Fiorina explained.
The kind one
Of the two, Hewlett was the soft-spoken, kind-hearted engineer you would rarely
see dressed in anything more than casual shirtsleeves. Lacking virtually all
pretense, Hewlett delighted in working on new products side-by-side with
employees or playing penny ante poker with them during breaks.
"Bill Hewlett was a great and gentle man. We, as stewards of his legacy,
will cherish and nurture Bill's bright spirit of invention, remembering and
celebrating the rich heritage that he and Dave entrusted us with,"
commented Fiorina upon learning of the death of the company's co-founder. Today,
Fiorina, like the founders themselves, still sits in a cubicle, not an office.
Added former HP CEO and chairman Lewis Platt, now CEO of Kendall-Jackson Wine
Estates, "Bill was one of the true pioneers and giants of the electronics
industry. He had a combination of inquisitiveness, creativity, clear thinking
and compassion, which you seldom find in a single individual. He will certainly
be missed but he leaves behind a legacy which will not soon be forgotten."
From the beginning, Hewlett had a strong ability to understand how new
technologies could become a successful product in the marketplace. In 1968, for
example, after HP had introduced a desktop scientific calculator, Hewlett asked
HP engineers to design something like it that would be small enough to fit in
his shirt pocket. The result was the HP-35, the world's first handheld
scientific calculator. When it was introduced in 1972, it made the slide rule
obsolete.
A humble beginning
William Redington Hewlett was born May 20, 1913 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, but at
the age of 3 moved to California where his father was a professor of medicine at
Stanford. He met and became friends with Packard while attending Stanford as an
engineering student. Both graduated in 1934. Packard went to work for General
Electric in New York and Hewlett went on to earn a master's degree at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A few years later, both were back in Palo Alto, where their former mentor,
Stanford Professor Frederick Terman encouraged them to start their own company.
Hewlett and Packard formalized their partnership on New Year's Day 1939 with a
coin toss to decide the company name. Had Packard won, PH would no doubt be a
household name in industry and consumer markets alike.
In the garage behind the house they rented in downtown Palo Alto, the two
built their first products. "We were a couple of young guys, just out of
Stanford. We thought we were pretty smart, and we thought we could contribute
something."
And contribute they did. The first real product success was Hewlett's audio
oscillator, a device to test sound equipment. Walt Disney bought eight for the
film ''Fantasia.'' The device was based on Hewlett's Stanford graduate thesis on
practical applications for the new electrical-engineering technology of negative
feedback.
Following that they built all kinds of systems in their struggle to get off
the ground. ''In the beginning, we did anything to bring in a nickel. We had a
bowling lane foul line indicator. We had a thing that would make a urinal flush
automatically as soon as a guy came in front of it. We had a shock machine to
make people lose weight," Hewlett recalled. Later, HP would offer thousands
of different products, from calculators to medical systems to simple diodes and
personal computer printers.
The two entrepreneurs managed to make a modest profit in their first year in
business. The company has remained profitable in each of the following 61 years.
World War II interrupted Hewlett's work at the company as he served as an
Army Signal Corps officer. Hewlett returned to HP in 1947 and was named vice
president. He was elected executive vice president in 1957, president in 1964
and CEO in 1969.
Hewlett, adhering to the company's strict HP Way policy on retiring at age
65, stepped down as HP's president in 1977 and chief executive officer the
following year. He remained vice chairman until 1987. Packard retired as
chairman in September 1993.
Giving back
Like Packard, Hewlett became one of the world's most generous philanthropists,
donating more than $9 billion of his wealth to charity, including the Flora
& William Hewlett Foundation he set up.
Hewlett, who loved to leave the office and go fishing with Packard, used his
foundation to fund river and wilderness preservation program. His foundation
will see its assets triple from $3 billion to more than $9 billion following the
founder's death. It will rank second only to the $13 billion Lucile & David
Packard Foundation. The two organizations will have a combined annual budget of
nearly a billion dollars.
Hewlett's foundation, like Hewlett himself will support the arts, global
population research and improved US-Latin American relations. Hewlett's modesty
made him stubbornly refuse having his name put on buildings he helped erect.
Just as their garage start-up inspired legions of entrepreneurs in Silicon
Valley and beyond, their two foundations are the models for Silicon Valley
charity. Many of the area's wealthy, and by extension Microsoft chief Bill
Gates, have followed in the footsteps of Hewlett and Packard in transferring
large chunks of the wealth they will never be able to spend to charitable
foundations.
"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the second great revolution in
American philanthropy by the establishment of their two sizable foundations,''
says Kirk Hanson, who teaches ethics and corporate responsibility at Stanford
University's Graduate School of Business.
Intel co-founder Gordon Moore cited both Hewlett and Packard when he
announced the establishment of his own $5 billion foundation last month.
"They were the first couple of guys to make a real fortune here in the
electronics industry. Both of them set good examples of giving it back to the
community and the world.''
Hewlett and Packard made personal, combined donations of more than $300
million to Stanford University alone. They contributed $77.4 million in October
1994 for the completion of a state-of-the-art science and engineering complex.
In 1994, each gave $12.5 million for the establishment of a Frederick Terman
Fellowship to honor the Stanford professor who was their mentor.
Life of accomplishments
Hewlett served as a director of Chrysler, Chase Manhattan Bank, FMC, and the
Overseas Development Council. In the 1960s, during the administration of
President Lyndon Johnson, he was a member of the President's General Advisory
Committee on Foreign Assistance Programs and the President's Science Advisory
Committee. He was co-founder of the American Electronics Association. Hewlett
was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed skiing, mountain climbing, hunting and
fishing. Along with Packard, he owned extensive cattle-ranching operations in
California and Idaho. Hewlett was committed to environmental issues,
particularly to preserving California's Lake Tahoe and Sierra regions. In his
later years, he pursued interests in botany, photography and history.
In 1985, then-President Reagan awarded Hewlett the National Medal of Science,
America's highest scientific honor.