Posts Tagged ‘HP’

The Technology Committee

February 2, 2010

San Jose Mercury News (CA)

December 23, 2001
Section: Business
Edition: Morning Final
Page: 1F

VC LEGEND LEADS CHARGE FOR HP-COMPAQ
WITH TIES TO BOTH COMPANIES, PERKINS HAS UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE
MATT MARSHALL, Mercury News

Thirty-six stories above the placid blue waters framing Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge, Thomas Perkins fidgets in his chair. If conversation lulls, his thumbs twiddle impatiently. He is a man driven by ambition. Perkins, 69, has turned his Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, into the most successful VC firm in the world. Kleiner Perkins has returned around $20 billion to investors over its 30-year history. But Perkins‘ impatience comes from his latest, unexpected challenge: the bitter battle over the proposed merger of Compaq Computer with Hewlett-Packard. As a board member of Compaq — and former executive at HP, the Palo Alto computer firm where he cut his teeth more than four decades ago — he has become one of the most outspoken backers of the merger. But some HP heirs — sons and daughters of founders William Hewlett and David Packard — have signaled their intent to vote down the deal, saying a merger doesn’t make economic sense. They also say the layoffs likely in a merger threaten to ruin HP‘s vaunted tradition, the so-called HP Way, which they say emphasizes company loyalty…

…A merger will create a mammoth company that can take on giant IBM — and beat it. HP and Compaq, he explains, have better ties with Microsoft and Intel — two other key protagonists in the computer industry drama. Together, he says, the foursome create an industry standard that can easily outdo IBM. ”Microsoft will be the software department, Intel will be the hardware department, and HP-Compaq will be the marketing-customer delivery department,” he says. ”Wouldn’t you go for it?” In part, Perkins is fighting for Compaq. But he also is fighting for his right to interpret the legacy that Packard and Hewlett left for Silicon Valley..

I remember opening the paper a couple of days before Christmas, 2001 and feeling like I had just been kicked in the stomach.  It was not the best time to be an officer of HP. Bill Hewlett’s son and HP board member, Walter, had come out swinging against the HP-Compaq merger, and Carly Fiorina, my boss, was under incredible pressure to sell the deal despite howls from the local press, the Hewlett and Packard families, an active message board for HP employees, and now a fractious board of directors. And there it was in black and white in the morning paper:   Tom Perkins, a Compaq board member and a driving force behind the merger had a plan to turn HP — the company whose logo said “invent” — into the marketing department for Intel and Microsoft.  I had to think hard about how I was going to face my own Technology Council and reassure HP’s 12,000 engineers that — despite what Perkins said in the  interview –  the company was not backing away from its commitment to innovation.

Earlier in the month, Carly had invited us to her house for a very low-key holiday celebration — much more subdued and informal than the elegant holidays parties that were the custom when the company was doing better.  Carly had paid for much of it out of her own pocket.  It  turned out to be a  tense and not not very festive evening.  Carly was running on a few hours of sleep, and the rest of us were trying to tie down the ship’s rigging in the middle of a storm. There was an air of uncertainty. We sat around smaller tables with our spouses as dinner was served.  Carly and her husband Frank were at an adjacent table.   As much to break the tension as anything, the discussion at our table turned into a silly  guessing game over which actors would be cast to play which of us when the HP-Compaq Merger Movie was made (West Wing star Allison Janney was the consensus choice to play Carly).   We must have been loud, because I could see Carly stiffen.  Carly didn’t know who on her own staff she could trust, and it must have sounded like we were tossing off the seriously difficult times that would be coming for HP and its employees.  We weren’t.

I spent virtually all of my time that winter keeping our major technology initiatives on track, promoting strategic product directions with customers, and talking to our engineering teams around the world.  The outcome of the proxy fight was uncertain and there would have been antitrust repercussions if HP and Compaq had gotten too cozy, so Webb McKinney, who was in charge of HP’s side of the integration team and the clean room that allowed the companies to begin planning merger details without violating antitrust laws, kept most of us with day-to-day management  responsibilities in the dark about post-merger plans for technology and products.

Once shareholders approved — by a hair’s breadth — the merger, Perkins was named to the board of the new HP.  Compaq’s  Shane Robison was named to a new position that combined my old CTO role and a Chief Strategy Officer position that had not existed before. I was still concerned about the Perkins comments from his December interview.  My first encounters with the Compaq technologists were not encouraging. I got into a shouting match with one of Robison’s staff members about how much HP should be investing in security for its products.  This was less than a year after the 9/11 attacks, and I had been working closely with CTO’s of other Silicon Valley companies and federal agencies to forge a comprehensive strategy for information and communications security.  The official Compaq position was that this was a problem for Microsoft, not HP, and I was told to keep quiet about it.

Imagine my surprise when Perkins and Robison led an effort to form a Technology Committee for the HP board to oversee and track R&D the same way that Audit, Governance, and Compensation Committees oversee financial  and operational matters.  I didn’t always agree with the direction it took, but it seemed to breathe new life into a technology governance process that had been stalled for many months.  Prior to that, HP — like most companies — did not place much visible  faith in its board to integrate technology into corporate governance.   There were a few public boards that had technology committees. They had been prominently featured in the  magazines for directors that wrote about best board practices, but those articles were disappointing:  most existing technology committees were for  informal oversight of technology spending by CIO’s.  What Perkins was  proposing was something different — and so at odds with his public statements about the value of a merged HP and Compaq that it took me a little while to catch on.   The HP Technology Committee would not only monitor  technology developments, it would help educate the board about new trends and directions that would impact board-level decisions and provide informed advice on the technology implications of financial and personnel decisions, including how to maintain a workforce advantage.

A committee like this would have been helpful years before, because HP had a history of plunging into technology investments and acquisitions that, to most technology observers, made little sense.  HP’s  decision in 2000  to purchase a middleware/software company called Bluestone was one such decision.  A distant fourth in a crowded and fragmented marketplace, the idea behind the Bluestone acquisition was based on a faulty reading of HP’s current capabilities in the space, the ability of any small entrant to alter the dynamics of the marketplace and the needs of HP-UX customers who felt themselves always last to the trough when third-party software developers released new products.  After two years of chaos and the dismantling of HP’s web services organizations, Bluestone was dumped at a $400 million  loss.

HP’s decision to sell its considerable VLSI design assets to Intel was also  made for financial reasons, although it was widely known in HP’s technology community  that the success of its 32 and  64 bit  processors, including  Itanium,  depended on custom chipsets that HP had invested  in for many years.  The original architects of Itanium were on my staff,  and it was hard to peel them off the ceiling when the announcement was made, especially since they had virtually no voice in the decision-making process.

Officers were invited to sit in on the  entire HP  board meeting, except for the closing executive sessions.  Even so,  it took me awhile to realize how rare technology discussions actually were. After a particularly fiery Industry Analysts’ Meeting, during which I made a slash-and-burn  presentation on our competitive advantages over Sun Microsystems –  that made the analysts smile but our marketing folks queasy — Carly asked me to reprise the talk for the board.  Patty Dunn (who would later take over as Chairman  in a controversial  tenure after Carly’s dismissal in 2005) and others approached me to say how much they appreciated the competitive information and the willingness to be combative in defense of HP product strategy.  They claimed, incredibly, that it was the first time they had heard this kind of presentation.

The Perkins proposal would have given the board a lens to look at issues like these — necessary in  a company where financial forecasts are only as good as the underlying technology.  HP was not only one  moving in this direction.  Motorola and other technology companies  had — at about the same time — formed Perkins-style Technology Committees.  Ram Charan’s book  Boards That Deliver helps explain why technology companies need to take the Technology Committee seriously, more importantly, how they can help  a board move beyond the role of compliance to a deeper assessment of health and prospects:

Financial health, operating performance and risk each require separate attention.  A company can show good operating performance while financial health…is in decline. Dot-com companies, for example, were notorious for delighting their customers with fantastic (or fantasy) products and services while bleeding cash.  Similarly financial health can appear to be sound when in fact the guts of the business have been severely compromised.  Any risk can be underestimated, especially when it is assessed piecemeal, rather than in totality.

The reason that the Technology Committee is a good idea for  public technology companies is that the worlds of innovation and execution are going to collide, and a board cannot deliver value by simply checking off a box on a governance worksheet.   What do you know, for example, about the real performance of key technology executives  without a deep insight into how they would be evaluated by their peers  and competitors?  How do you know that an acquisition based on a couple of good financial quarters and self-congratulatory product  press releases has no market advantage over an in-house solution?   That’s not the kind of question that due diligence is going to ask. After I left the company, I watched the downsizing of research and heard often from former friends and colleagues who thought one decision or another was wrong-headed, and I often  wondered about how effectiveness the committee actually was.  And then I would see something preserved that made no short-term financial sense, although everyone knew how important the technology would be some day.

When I joined the board of RSA Security, I was definite about my plans.  “Look,” I told CEO Art Coviello, “RSA’s performance is a three-legged stool, and the board needs to be as informed about the technology and markets as it is about finance and operations.” Ram Charan would have said the three legs are Finance, Operating Performance and Risk. I said the risks are Technology, Markets and Organization. Both Art and Chairman Jim Simms were on board, but it was not an easy proposition to sell to the rest of  RSA’s board, although I did.  The RSA Technology Committee had a big impact on board dynamics and ultimately on the long-term health of the company.  It is one of the WWC success stories that I will tell in more detail in a later post.

I can’t think of any reason that the board of directors of  a public company — especially a technology company — needs seven CFO’s, but that is the profile of far too many companies.  Even  on boards where the majority of the non-management directors are CEO’s, financial expertise overwhelms all other skills, and it is not healthy.  It’s hard to find a technology company that has failed in recent years where the  roots of failure were not widely known on that other planet outside the boardroom.  I emphasize public companies only because they are great targets.  Later stage privately held companies would also be wise to pay attention to board dynamics and find some way get a handle on the company’s technology.

Once I got over the stomach ache that Tom Perkins gave me, I realized why technology had a seat at the table of his boards.   Kleiner-Perkins got to be the world’s greatest venture capital firm by delving deeply into the  technology implications of business decisions.  Engineers have the impression that board rooms are filled with accountants who know very little about the details of the  business but are not shy when it comes to talking about it.  Enter the Technology Committee.

I always liked the scene in Annie Hall where Alvy Singer, the Woody Allen character,   is getting more and more annoyed by a guy standing behind him in a movie theater line who is carrying on about Marshall McCluhan, trying to impress his date:

Man in Theatre Line: It just so happens I teach a class at Columbia called “TV, Media and Culture.” So I think my insights into Mr. McLuhan, well, have a great deal of validity!
Alvy Singer: Oh, do ya? Well, that’s funny, because I happen to have Mr. McLuhan right here, so, so, yeah, just let me… [pulls McLuhan out from behind a nearby poster]… Come over here for a second… tell him!
Marshall McLuhan: I heard what you were saying! You know nothing of my work!…How you got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing!
Alvy Singer: Boy, if life were only like this!

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The “dy” Logo

January 18, 2010

I enjoyed reading  the new book about innovation at Hewlett-Packard  that Chuck House and Raymond Price just published[1]. It’s quirky and curiously researched, but, most of all, I was happy to read their account of Carly Fiorina’s tenure as CEO at HP.  History was in need of some fact-based revision.   If ever worlds collided, it was at HP when Carleton S.  Fiorina took over the reins after a stunning rise through the executive ranks at ATT/Lucent.  Chuck  points out that, although Carly was not well-liked by her employees (even her direct reports, many  of whom  ultimately undermined her), she sowed the seeds for Mark Hurd’s success.

The executive suite at HP Headquarters on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto was in those days a row of large cubicles, and, in keeping with  the HP culture, there were no doors and no outer offices.   Everyone’s office  – including Carly’s — was really just a cubicle. Carly insisted that I have two offices: one in HP Labs adjacent to the museum-like offices of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard — these were not cubicles but were real offices,  impeccably maintained in their original 1960′s orange-and-brown Madmen decor —   and the other next to hers overlooking  a Japanese garden.    Carly’s executive council met nearly every week in a nearby conference room whose glass wall looked out over the same garden.

Several   council members had offices elsewhere, but those of us who had direct access were within a thirty-foot radius of her office.  These were the Gold Badge days at HP when a favored few retirees were granted the privilege of unrestricted, lifetime access to any building and any office suite in the company. The daily comings and goings telegraphed events that would not be visible outside the CEO’s office for days or weeks, even among business heads who had broad authority over multi-billion dollar enterprises.  This turned out to be an important vantage point from which to view sand being  thrown in the gears during HP’s acquisition of Compaq, but I will save these stories for later posts.

Chuck House had been gone from HP for some time when Carly arrived, so his account is based on interviews with a relatively narrow slice of insiders who were his colleagues — an impressive number of people, to be sure, but in a company with 80,000 employees not enough for a definitive portrait.  But House has never been shy about charging ahead when the terrain looks interesting, a personality trait that once earned him a medal from Dave Packard for “Extraordinary Contempt and Defiance Beyond the Call of Duty.”  It was awarded to commemorate a mutinous tour of customer sites to demonstrate a new display monitor after HP management in Colorado Springs had decided to shut it down.   Nevertheless, House’s account gets many things right.  One of the things he misses was what Fiorina brought to HP:  a WWC focus on the customer that was foreign to HP’s engineering culture before her arrival.

House and Price defer to old-guard HP employees in characterizing Carly as a marketer, a fiction that was rooted more in style than in substance.  Fiorina was unnervingly accurate in her assessment of general  market trends,  like the importance of the internet to HP’s mainline businesses,  but, in fact, she was a consummate saleswoman.   What she brought to the table was not the “let’s-see -what -they-think-about-this” arrogance of corporate marketing organizations,  it was the ability to listen to customers, sift through encyclopedic  knowledge of internal plans and projects, and  envision a solution.  Sometimes a  solution was forthcoming.  Sometimes it took a little while longer than customers were willing to wait.  But sometimes solutions were sabotaged.   To have an HP outsider from the East Coast — a telephone equipment salesman, not an engineer — propose a solution to customer problems was an unpardonable sin to some.   It was a WWC culture class that she was slow to recognize.

She was widely criticized for her lack of operational experience, but  the truth is that Carly delegated operational authority too widely and to managers with suspect motives (including past and future pretenders to the throne).  As a newcomer,  I tended to apologize for injecting long-range thoughts into the very operational discussions of the Executive Council, until one day Carly stopped me and said: “You don’t have to apologize for that.  It’s true that we’ll never get to the long-term without taking care of the short-term, but it’s the long-term that makes the short-term worth doing at all.”

Council chemistry changed in the months before the Compaq merger. Vyomesh Joshi took over as head of the imaging and printing business unit.  V.J. is not only a brilliant executive, he is a skilled engineer, whose technical  insights  were mainly responsible for transforming ink jet printing.

The other major additions were Pradeep Jotwani and Iain Morris.  Pradeep had control of worldwide consumer  sales.  He was fond of  long discourses —  sometimes literary, sometimes merely speculative — but their effect was always to slow down a speeding train and turn the discussion in a direction that was more productive.  Iain is a big, brash, Harley-riding  Scott  who Carly recruited from Motorola to carve out emerging businesses  like handheld computers and  entertainment.  Carly quickly transferred   the personal computer businesses to Iain from Duane Zitzner’s  computer business unit where they had languished as unprofitable also-rans.  Morris knew hardware, software and manufacturing from his days at Motorola, and he was also a great salesman.

At one of his first Council meetings, Iain walked in with an HP laptop and stopped everyone cold when he opened it up and bellowed: “What’s wrong here?”  When you  looked at an open HP laptop from the back, the “hp” logo was upside down. It read “dy”, and of course,  that was the way most people saw the laptop:  open and  from the back, inverted logo.  If anyone before had noticed this, it never made it to the upper reaches of management.  The order went out immediately to invert the logo and all of the millions of HP laptops produced since that time now display the logo right side up,  so that it reads “hp”.  It upset some of the industrial designers who argued that laptops were closed a lot of the time and that the orientation of the logo doesn’t matter when a laptop is closed.  It took a salesman’s eye to recognize that it was stupid to have millions customers staring at a “dy”  laptop.

This episode followed on the heels of two other quick-shifts.  One involved HP’s always painful  Federal sales performance.  I will talk about this more fully in a later post.  The other involved architectural consistency,  a concept that bridged customer issues and product design.

Shortly after VJ took over the imaging and printing business, he held an advanced projects review for me in San Diego.  I was struck but the ubiquity of infrared (IR) connectivity ports on HP printers and cameras, and mentioned it to VJ.  He had many compelling reasons for insisting on IR, but complained that Zitzner’s PC division had recently removed IR ports from HP laptops.

To Duane’s immense displeasure, I called  a meeting with some of his design engineers, ostensibly to review the component cost envelope for laptops.  At the end of the meeting, when everyone was worn out,  I asked about IR, and they had a string of good reasons to throw it out.  When I pointed out that HP printers, cameras, and PC’s no longer worked together, they just sat there blinking at me.  Carly overruled engineering objections and IR ports made  a miraculous (albeit short-lived) reappearance in HP laptops.

It would  not be apparent outside the CEO suite for months, but architectural consistency was a technology theme that would drive many R&D investment decisions, both near-term and long-term.   In an effort to jump-start a consumer-facing initiative, Carly had approached Sony about sharing some key technologies.  One of Sony’s success stories was the introduction of memory stick technology into a broad range of Sony products from hundred-dollar consumer entertainment devices to studio-quality video cameras that cost a half million dollars or more.  My counterpart at Sony was a CTO named Mario Tokoro, a computer scientist and engineer who had spent time at the famous computer science department at Carnegie-Mellon University.  Mario had been instrumental in arranging for memory stick technology across a staggering array of Sony’s consumer and business products. The idea of arranging product strategies around this kind of architectural unity would have sped up HP’s brief surge in Internet and Web technologies.  It was an idea that was undone by colliding worlds on a much different scale.

[1] Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price, The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation, Stanford Business Books, 2009

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The Saga of Eric the Red and the Anthropology of Innovation: A Parable

December 28, 2009
Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Eric the Red) Icelandic manuscript (17th century)

Eiríks saga rauða (Saga of Eric the Red) Icelandic manuscript (17th century)

In Murder, Starvation and Catastrophe, I drew a line to connect the historical behavior of doomed societies with the business performance of large enterprises.  One of the most compelling of Jared Diamond’s stories is the saga of Eric the Red, the 10th Century Viking who founded Greenland.  The preposterously named colony was eventually home to 10,000 Norse settlers who were perhaps fooled by the name into thinking they were heading off to some sort of North Sea resort for Vikings. The story of Eric the Red is a parable for how the human factor in WWC  promotes or stifles innovation.

Eric was a scoundrel.  A suspected murderer, he fled Norway for Iceland around 980 AD.  It was a short, but violent, stay.  He was ejected from Iceland, and, sailing west, discovered an island of fjords, glaciers and grasslands. He returned to Iceland long enough to kill a few people and recruit an expedition of 25 ships to build a settlement on Greenland. Despite their violent beginnings,  the Greenland settlers established a farming economy and a humane society, including a government that provided for the poor in times of scarce crop production.  The Viking settlers had sporadic wars with the Inuit natives, but apparently flourished for hundreds of years until sometime in the early 1400’s when they just disappeared.

It was one of the great anthropological mysteries of all time:   how could fierce competitors — apparently successful  in a new environment that was not much different than the one they left behind – suddenly fail so catastrophically that their entire society was wiped out in only a few years? When archaeologists excavated the Greenland settlements, they found the usual trash of human civilization:  tools, debris, the remains of livestock,  and garbage from cooking.  But they found no fish bones.  The Norse Greenlanders were expert seafarers who lived in the world’s richest fishing waters and inexplicably starved to death because they did not eat fish.

The Vikings brought with them the culture and preferences from home. They brought food:  pigs, cows, goats,  and sheep.  The Norse knew how to grow crops in cold climates, so they planted crops like barley, oats, wheat, rye, cabbage, onions and peas. They hunted seal for food and  traded  walrus ivory with Europe  for material not available on the island.

By 1400,  demand for ivory, polar bears, and other luxuries from Greenland fell. Black Plague had wiped out nearly half of Europe’s population.  The Crusades opened new sources of ivory and spices to the now smaller market in Europe. The early 1400’s also marked the beginning of the Little Ice Age, blocking natural water inlets and delaying the arrival of migratory seals.  Deforestation left Greenlanders short on lumber, fuel, and iron.  Climate change and poor crop rotation led to crop failure, so the settlers consumed pigs, cows, and sheep to the point of extinction.

They had cultural inhibitions.  They did not eat their pets, for example.  They could have learned to hunt fish from and traded with the Inuits, but the Norse regarded the natives as pagans. Greenlanders were Norse, and they thought of themselves as dairy farmers.  When Eric the Red founded Greenland, it was uncharacteristically temperate —  a special time when their cultural preferences led to success.  They relied on past behavior and — when the climate changed, relations with friends and enemies faltered, and their environment was damaged —  they starved to death.

15th Century Greenland has something in common with IBM  in 1980:  a belief that historically successful behavior will succeed in the future. The Norse preference for pigs and cows required them to dedicate more time and grazing land to those animals than to the heartier goats and sheep.  Their Euro-centrism prevented them from learning from and adopting the eating habits of “pagan savages.” The thinking appears to be that their lifestyle was successful in Norway, so there’s no reason it shouldn’t be successful in Greenland. On the other hand the Norse settlers were not great innovators.

Thomas Watson Sr, understood the role that innovation would play in the company’s future. He opened IBM’s  first dedicated research center next to Columbia University in 1945 and the results were immediate, spectacular innovations including time sharing and  magnetic core memories.  Thomas Watson, thinking it was too risky to continue having its research done in the relative open environment of a joint university lab, and using Bell Labs as a model, established dedicated corporate research labs in New York and Zurich. This ushered in a golden age for IBM.  By any measure of success—sales, market cap, profits, patents, R&D budget—IBM,  and  in many ways,  defined the industry.

Then came the 1980’s and its disruptive changes to the computer industry. These  changes were not kind to IBM and in 1992 the company reported the single largest annual loss in U.S. corporate history to that point: $4.96 billion after taxes.

How did this happen?  Unlike the Greenlanders’ demise, this one isn’t a great mystery.  The Watsons believed fervently that doing the things that had made IBM a great corporation would make it successful in the future.  IBM knew how to profitably sell computers and to whom.  After all, they defined the industry.  There is a widely known internal 5-year forecast of worldwide PC sales that shows shipments peaking  at less than 80,000 units in 1983 before settling into a comfortable rate of 40,000 per year by 1987.  Less than 250,000 over the five year period.  5% to business customers who would continue to rely on IBM mainframes.  In fact, over a million PC’s were sold by 1985.  The industry was in the midst of explosive change and not only did IBM did not recognize it but they believed that past success was a predictor of future success.

But by 1982 it was all over. If IBM had recognized the value of the PC, they would have kept it proprietary and the computer industry would have developed very differently.  Without its IBM  licensing deal, Microsoft would have withered early.  Intel would be a niche player.

IBM, Xerox,  AT&T, and Nortel were all  innovative companies.  They hired the best and brightest – and there was low employer mobility since after all how many places were there for a computer science PhD to work?  The IBM Research Lab in Yorktown Heights developed and incubated products in the historically successful vertical way.  The barriers to entry for IBM’s  competitors (especially the small ones like Compaq and DEC) were huge. How could a small competitor build a direct sales network to rival the famed Xerox sales force?  What did an academic startup like Cisco,  aimed at the tiny data network market, have to do with the output Bell Labs or the market clout of Nortel?

This is how innovation looked at the end of the last century. It is too easy to draw conclusions about why old models stumble.  An apparently obvious lesson from the story of Erick the Red is that  the Little Ice Age caused the Vikings to die off in Greenland. Current conventional wisdom is that the technology giants stumbled  because they were too old or rigid or bloated to compete smaller, nimbler competitors who were themselves innovating although in very different ways.  Actually neither is really true.

It is simply built into the fabric of innovation that the marketplace is an environment – you have to adapt to it to survive.  If people want low-cost computers then drive cost out of the manufacturing process and learn to prosper on thinner margins. There are occasionally companies that try to change the environment.  Hewlett-Packard grew for 60 years on a simple business model:  innovate to create a product category and ride market growth until the margins shrink.  Then exit.  The ink jet printer is such a product — and there is much discussion in HP about exit strategies for ink jet printing. So was the hand-held calculator.  Most companies cannot imitate those successes. HP eventually faltered when it tried large scale environmental engineering with its failed acquisition of PWC and the gut-wrenching merger with Compaq.

So, if adjusting to the environment is the answer, why didn’t the Greenlanders just start eating fish?  The Greenlanders damaged their environment through poor livestock selection, clear-cutting forests and poor crop-rotation. There was significant climate change brought on by the Little Ice Age. The Inuit qualify as hostile neighbors.  They had friendly trade partners for many years, but eventually lost them.  But above all,  the Norse Greenlanders’ response to these factors was culturally based.  They didn’t eat fish  because it was not viewed as a reasonable option in their culture.

Innovation is frittered away because it is not viewed as a reasonable option in a company’s culture.  The structure of leadership accounts for a lot in determining the role that culture plays.   Distant, authoritarian, decision-making tends to rely excessively on the past as a predictor of the future.  Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer said as much  in a 2008 speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Business:

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made over time…is not wanting to nurture innovations where I either didn’t get the business model or we didn’t have it.

Examples abound. The HP Jornada™ pocket PC could play MP3 music files before the  iPod™  hit the market.  But there was no HP music store. Running an online music store was not an HP competency.  There is a certain — sometimes irrational –  optimism that past success engenders in leaders at the precipice.  When Mike Zafirovsky took over as CEO of Nortel Networks in late 2005, it was a company on the brink of failure.  Massive layoffs had decimated the iconic Canadian company.  In early 2006, I was escorted for the last time through its cavernous Toronto facility — a building laid out as a city with streets and parks — just before it was shut down.  All you could hear was the click of heels reverberating down the empty faux boulevards. Mike Zafirovsky wanted to communicate his energy and sense of the future to the demoralized employees who remained.  His first email  in December 2005 to Nortel employees defined the tone of his administration and sent the company down a path that emphasized execution of a plan that emphasized ideas that had worked before:

To Nortel employees,

Last Friday night, as I was flying back from a very productive trip to Europe following several customer and employee visits, I came across a newspaper article entitled “Optimism Puts Rose-Colored Tint in Glasses of Top Execs.” Included in the article were quotes like:

“99% of CEOs thought they could lead their companies from crisis;”
“Optimism is all about possibilities, change, hope…without those qualities, how can any leader succeed?;” and,
· “By definition, leaders are slightly delusional.”

My first reaction was to take exception to the word “slightly” . . . .

Seriously, the question of our confidence in ourselves—and as members of Team Nortel—is something I will begin discussing today and a topic I will continue to raise in the coming weeks and months. Confidence in ourselves and each other will be critical factors in how far and how fast we take this 110-year-old company..

I discussed with you in a previous letter our plans for the BIG initiative (Business Transformation, Integrity Renewal and Growth Imperatives), our new leadership values, and our focus on people that will be rolled out as part of Session I in the first quarter. In my first few weeks, I have also spent time evaluating our relative strengths and weaknesses and pinpointing areas for improvement.

…My strong take-aways and beliefs are that our positives are significant and difficult to replicate. At the same time, our challenges are also significant but, I would argue, very fixable. I don’t believe I am looking through rose-colored glasses, but rather have adopted what I describe as an attitude of “forceful optimism.” This is a mindset, a belief and an attitude that I expect from everyone at Nortel—a combination of positive anticipation for the future combined with a determined approach to maximize positive impact.

Forceful optimism is one of the 30 action attributes supporting our recently-defined Nortel leadership values. And as promised in my last letter to you, I worked with select members of the Leadership Edge program and cabinet members to finalize these attributes before year-end.
[...]

As a positive heads-up to the many people who were hoping to be on the Business Transformation teams, we will be kicking off the Six Sigma Quality Program in the first quarter, and there will be opportunities for involvement and leadership. We will be looking for Six Sigma champions and master black belt, black belt, and green-belt candidates (much more on this early next year).

The combination of the Business Transformation initiative and the Six Sigma Quality Program will improve the basic equation of our business, including higher customer satisfaction, simplified processes, lower cost-of-rework, fewer quality issues and lower costs for our products and business structure. And we’ll see teamwork inside the company improving as a result. We will continue the focus on forceful optimism, leadership and our people agenda by launching our Session I program in the first quarter. The programs and initiatives we deliver as part of Session I will ensure we are building strong leadership capability and bench strength across Nortel.

Lastly, and arguably most important for the long-term health of the business, here are my thoughts on customers and the Growth Imperatives, which you will be hearing much more on throughout 2006. I am meeting and speaking with an increasing number of our customers (e.g. the four largest European customers last week) and our go-to-market and product management teams, and I can’t wait to attend our global sales conferences in January. In my straightforward view, good, profitable growth is to a business as air and water are to flowers. We have much to build on and also much work to do, including how we develop meaningful value propositions for our customers. To this end, I am excited to report that we will be introducing our new business mission at the sales meetings. It will guide much of our behavior externally and internally, and keep the focus where it belongs—on our customers.

Let me wrap it up by saying how privileged and proud I am to be leading Nortel and to be working with all of you. I wish you and your loved ones a relaxing holiday and warm wishes for a healthy, happy, and prosperous 2006.

Thank you for all you are doing for Nortel.

Mike Z

Mike Zafirovsky is a capable senior executive, an alumnus of Jack Welch’s CEO boot camp at GE.  He was part of a long string of strong leaders that Nortel recruited to put the company back on track.   He could not have anticipated the Little Ice Age of late 2008, but by New Year 2006, Nortel was already hurtling toward disaster.  Its stock was delisted and the company was shrinking.   I asked Mike about industry changes, but he did not react.  There was no sense of urgency at Nortel. There was a sense that the telecom equipment market was not an environment at all and that what really mattered was the company’s belief that its current direction would take them back from the edge: “a combination of positive anticipation for the future combined with a determined approach to maximize positive impact.”

In January 2009, Nortel filed for protection from its creditors. Its main businesses are being sold. When that is complete,  it will cease operations. Zafirovsky stepped down as CEO in late 2009.

One of my first projects at Bellcore  was to redefine its core software business for the emerging ISP and Cable markets.  The climate was changing in the early 90’s.  Bellcore sold  operations support systems – a sort of ERP for telcos.  A typical sale was in the $25-30M range and $100M deals were not unheard of. So we rolled up all the functions that we could think of – customer acquisition, provisioning, engineering, support – and came up with a product that we thought we could sell for $15M.  When we showed the requirements to cable operators, they just shrugged.  They were using Excel spreadsheets which cost them essentially nothing.  Today, Bellcore — operating under the name Telcordia — leads in none of the operations support or business support markets that defined its core business in the 1990′s and is not even in the top ten in cable and ISP markets.  What they really wanted help with were the services that they could sell to their customers.  One of those services was search.  Another was customer aggregation.  Both were areas in which Bellcore had fundamental patents.  One for the “seed” that underlies virtually all search engines today.  The other for “recommender” technology that underlies all social networking. The search technology was given away to Excite.  The recommender technology was assigned to MIT’s Media Lab and eventually became part of Amazon’s recommendation engine.  We were not in the lightweight database business – although there were many smaller competitors who were.  We were not in the search engine or social networking  businesses, although we had friendly relations with companies that were and had many university collaborations.  We were in the software business.

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Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

September 22, 2009

In the irreverent, satirical movie Brain Candy the scientist who is responsible for the eponymous drug that takes the world by storm and briefly turns an ailing pharmaceutical company into a global powerhouse is invited along with his team to the CEO’s house for a celebration.  While his nerdy team members are left at a dismal affair of chicken salad and soggy potato chips, the scientist is escorted to the real party, a sophisticated Bacchanalia complete with caviar, Champagne, celebrities, super models,and swimming pools.  Few Champagne-and-caviar parties in today’s corporate climate, but there is still a sense that when dinner is served for top decision-makers, R&D does not have a seat at the table or is – at best – a distraction.  R&D is a somewhat curious, uncomfortable, and frequently unwelcome guest.

There are obvious signals when the worlds of technology innovation and business execution are on collision courses.  There are early warnings that reverberate through organizations, but they tend to go unnoticed because corporations make  it  easy to set up effective filters.  Warnings can show up in the very language that R&D management uses to talk about the rest of the company.  In “Are R&D Customers Always Wrong?” I quote former GM research chief Robert Frosch talking about the

…ocean of corporate problems

as if they were the problems of some alien world into which the GM R&D Center had been dropped.  In “Well, what kind of fraud is it?” Edward clearly lived in a different world, and the many “Loose Cannons” who I still hear from were never able to bridge the gulf.  Everyone seems to be a helpless observer to a catastrophe over which they have no control.

My experience is that senior executives, starting in the boardroom, can too easily focus on events that are rushing at them — too fast for effective reaction — ignoring the events that are still far enough away to anticipate.   There is, for example, an overwhelming feeling  that, since the time of a chief executive  is so precious, every step should be taken to avoid diluting the CEO’s time with minutiae.  To be perfectly honest, technologists tend to do that – passion for a technology project can fill a briefing with flourishes that are meant to be savored and admired by peers, not convey actionable information to decision-makers.  But that doesn’t excuse what in my view has become the regrettable practice in large companies of filling virtually all executive time with managing cash, debt, and other financial indicators of performance.

Financial performance in a technology company rests on other factors, too. Market disruptors, for example, are rarely predicted by financial analysis.  Even annual strategic planning and investment is a barren exercise without the participation of an educated team to make sense of the alternatives.  In an industry with many acquisition targets the ones that should occupy the attention of senior management are not necessarily the ones that have the strongest near-term business cases because those may not be the ones that advance long term goals.  Intel chairman Andy Grove once said that a Board’s responsibility is to

…insure that company success is longer than the CEO, market opportunity, or product cycle.

I will have more to say in later posts about the collision between decisions that really advance long term goals and those that are simply chosen from a list of predetermined alternatives.  What starts in the boardroom is inevitably replicated at other levels.  To deal with all of the important factors that determine success of a technology company  technology leaders must have a seat at the table.  Avoid collisions by inviting them to dinner.

I’ve worked with many senior executives who have set a technology place at the table with oftentimes-spectacular results, but today I want to focus on my Bellcore mentor CEO George Heilmeier, winner of the 2005 Kyoto Prize for his invention of the liquid crystal display.  George, along with Bellcore research chief Bob Lucky and head of the software business Sanjiv Ahuja led the remarkable transformation of Bellcore from an inward looking R&D consortium to the profitable stand-alone supplier of telecom software and services that was divested by the Bell Operating Companies and acquired by systems integrator SAIC in 1997.   Bellcore generated enough cash in the first quarter after being acquired to pay back the entire purchase price. George took particular delight in his mentor role.  Even during his busiest days at Bellcore, he would wander into my office, put his feet up on the coffee table, and ask what was going on in the labs, a conversation that often went on long into the evening.

One of George’s most enduring contributions to the R&D culture at Bellcore (and, as I later found out, to Texas Instruments, Compaq, and DARPA) was the Catechism.  I tried many times to get him to call it something else because I really believed that some in our multicultural environment would be offended by the term, but he always ignored my suggestion and in the end nobody seemed to mind very much.  The Catechism was George’s way of framing every strategic discussion, but he took particular care to make sure it was used to manage technology.  I later found out that others, including former Intel research head David Tennenhouse, who had also been swept into George’s wide path, had also carried the Catechism tradition forward.  According to the Catechism every strategic proposal in the company had to answer the following six questions:

  1. What are you trying to do? (No Jargon)
  2. How is it done today and what are the limitations of current practice?
  3. What is new in your approach and why do you think it will succeed?
  4. Assuming success, what does in mean to customers and the company?  This is the quantitative value proposition.
  5. What are the risks and the risk reduction plan?
  6. How long will it take?  How much will it cost? What are the mid term and final exams?

At Bellcore, George personally ran a Quarterly CEO Technology Council Review, where R&D managers from around the company would present their best ideas – always using the Catechism — for innovations to heads of the strategic business units, sales, and marketing.  Sometimes to the consternation of both the CFO and  the head of sales, George would reward skunk works projects that had terrific answers with additional resources to continue their work.  I wondered many times about the metaphor mixing in Question Six, but again it didn’t seem to both others.  There was no complicated process.  If you answered the questions well and the value proposition made sense, you got enough to get you going.  If the project was a little further along, you needed business unit heads to also buy in, and so on until it made sense to tie cost and revenue goals to the project. By that time the balance of the authority for the project was in a product group so the Technology Council could disengage. Amazing ideas came out of this process including the word’s first e-commerce products and an amazing quality transformation among the company’s more than 6,000 software engineers.

George Heilmeier’s Catechism was the inspiration for my Loose Cannon escalation process at HP.  HP was about 50 times larger than Bellcore so the idea of a quarterly CEO review was not feasible.  However my Technology Council was a direct pathway to the Executive Council so the effect was the same.

I sat down with George last spring for a wide-ranging conversation.  Much of what he had to say about both the Catechism and seats at the table has also appeared elsewhere – most notably in his five public speeches in conjunction with the Kyoto Prize.[1] The work that won him the Kytoto Prize was done in the 1960’s at RCA’s Sarnoff Laboratories in Princeton, where he had recently completed his PhD.   This included the discovery of electro-optic effects in certain kinds of liquid crystals that would be used to build  the first liquid crystal displays.   George always claims that he just “stumbled upon it” but he quotes Vladimir Zworykin, a television pioneer  with commenting:

“Stumbled, perhaps, but to stumble you must be moving.”

Heilmeier became disillusioned with the slow pace of change at RCA and left to spend a year as a White House Fellow, an assignment that turned into an appointment as Special Assistant to Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and later to his appointment as head of DARPA.  Schlesinger and other White House mentors gave George a seat in senior policy discussions from the earliest day, and his growing comfort with proximity to important decision-making shaped his outlook on the value of a seat at the table. Two lessons stuck with him.  First was the negative power of vested interests:  in times of change those with the most to lose will fight tooth and nail to undermine it and those with the most to gain do not yet realize how much they have to gain.   Second was the negative aspect of “technology transfer”.  George was never a fan of throwing technology “over the transom”.  His commitment to providing an equal voice for innovation grew out of his experience that it was much better to form what he calls an “interdisciplinary team” with representation from R&D, product engineering and manufacturing  (he still believes that marketing is best done organically with all members of the team interacting with customers).   The leadership and balance of this team shifts as time goes on.  This is the dinner table.

In my next post, I’ll give you an example of these principles in action: a transformational event that could only have been successful with a seat at the table and that would have been killed by a distant CEO, undiluted with the minutiae of technological disruption.

[1] A Moveable Feast: Kyoto Prize Lecture (SD Version), 2005

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Loose Cannons, Volume 1

September 7, 2009

Dilbert.com

This is my all-time favorite Dilbert cartoon. Anyone who has ever worked in a large corporation like Hewlett-Packard understands immediately what’s going on here.  I always used it in CTO coffee talks when I wanted to show our engineers that I was really one of them — that I  wasn’t from another world (although I  suspected that many of them were already convinced that I was the pointy-haired boss and some thought I was Blob).  After a few hours, like clockwork, the email would start pouring into my inbox.  The subject line was always something like: “From a Loose Cannon.”

Some of the messages were very strange and a few (like the ones talking about contacting aliens from space) were downright disturbing, but most of them were respectful notes to let me know of  legitimate ideas that hadn’t made it through internal management gates.  I knew the engineering managers well.  They were smart and careful and for the most part they were very successful.  I didn’t want to second-guess their investment decisions, but I started wondering whether another sort of investment analysis would give a different answer, because these were obviously colliding worlds.

I was not popular with some of HP’s general managers because I had invented a new sort of escalation path for engineers, inviting ideas that had already been turned down at some point in the management chain.  I created a Technology Council consisting of the CTO’s of each of the major business units, the Director and Chief Scientist from HP Labs and some  HP Fellows to help with technology strategy and road-mapping, so it made a great deal of sense to use this team to take one more look at some of the Loose Cannon Ideas.

One of the Loose Cannons proposed using HP’s Jornada Pocket PC “to control my TV and VCR or other IR devices – that way you could store stuff in there and program those things simply and easily.” Another L-C wanted to create a document management system for the “growing home genealogist market”.

The company already had a rich history of encouraging risk-taking by its technical staff, but at HP business objectives were never far from sight.  There was a 60-year history of combining risk with rational investment.  It was a strategy that worked well.  It was lightweight, and I think that’s why cool new products and sometimes whole new product categories continued to flow out of R&D activities.  I am not only talking about the research labs. At that time there were over  12,000 engineers, many of whom had advanced degrees and were rewarded for patents, publications and other creative work; there was incredible bench strength. I will have more to say in later posts about how this process of identifying and nurturing creative ideas was carried out, but today I want to concentrate on the very specific calculation that virtually all R&D managers in the company learned.  I think that the legendary Joel Birnbaum was responsible for it, but my friend Stan Williams, who for many years now has guided HP’s nanotechnology and quantum computing research nailed the analysis in a dramatic way[1]:

…Why don’t we put together a program to become the world’s best center in quantum computation?

The answer is that even in the research labs we have to be ‘cold blooded’ businessmen…The first question is this: what is going to be the total world market for the technology?…The answer is, looking 15 years ahead, $1 trillion per year…we then have to ask what fraction of the market will belong to quantum computation…Now, how much could HP capture if it went after it very aggressively…[then] the question is if we could sell that 15 years from now that is the appropriate level of investment for that income stream?

Stan then incorporated development costs, risks and barriers and the time value of money to conclude:

…even when addressing a significant share of a $100 billion market that is 15 years in the future, the amount of money we should be spending now is about a million dollars per year.  In an industrial laboratory environment that’s about three researchers with their associated overhead costs.

Every engineering manager in the company knew how to play this calculation in reverse:  if we fund one full time engineer to pursue a new, untested idea, what is the possible income stream we would see from that research 3, 5, 8, or 15 years from now?  Many – maybe most – of the technical staff understood it, too. And yet, there were these L-C ideas that just never seemed to go away. A generation earlier Dick Hackborn had been a management champion for inkjet printing, a crazy, complicated way of spraying colored water on paper, that even today accounts for most of HP’s financial success. As far as I know Dick was not in the decision chain for printing solutions, but he was a very influential guy and his sponsorship swayed many opinions at the topmost levels of management.

So what was the Technology Council’s role in all of this?  The company was much bigger, and a consequence of size is a decreased reliance on individual opinion and an increased reliance on quantitative processes.  As a result new ideas needed to be accompanied by a business case analysis that supplied both the decision model and the critical financial and market parameters. The difficulty was that business managers were making decisions mainly about their markets and their risks which affects the starting point for Stan’s calculation and may dramatically underestimate the role that organizational barriers play in estimating the total risk.  The Technology Council was in a position to combine information from a number of business units and recalculate the business case.

Here’s one example. HP was at that time organized into four large business units:  one for personal computers, one for services, one for large servers, and another for printing.  The software in HP’s most expensive servers was a version of the original Unix developed at Bell Labs in the 1970’s called HP-UX.  It was one of the most important profit drivers for HP’s high performance business systems but it was under pressure from the high volume Microsoft-based market on one side and other Unix variants such as Linux, Solaris, and AIX on the so-called “value” side of the server market. The Printing Group also was in the software business, designing drivers and user interfaces for printers and scanners that were attached to personal computers and workgroup servers.  The focus of printing software was on the large and very profitable market for Microsoft-based PC’s, workstations, and servers.  By comparison, relatively few of the much more expensive HP-UX systems were sold.  The Printing Group did the Williams calculation and concluded that investing in software for HP-UX was not warranted.  The Server Group meanwhile was being starved for printing solutions.  Customers were asking for it.  Lack of HP-UX printing support meant lost sales, but HP-UX software developers would have needed engineering support from their colleagues in the Printing Group in order to make any headway.  Printing did not see enough downstream revenue to justify such an investment.

A Loose Cannon proposed that my office should fund a cross-business initiative in HP-UX printing solutions.  When the Technology Council looked at the opportunities that were being lost, it was clear that even a modest investment would pay off in the very near term.  Although we didn’t realize it at the time, it turned out that HP’s investment in Linux would quickly  take hold in the marketplace, so the investment in HP-UX printing had a big impact on that market as well.

There were worlds smashing into each other all over the place in those days, and there were two organizational decisions that made a difference.  The first was Carly Fiorina’s decision to make the CTO a member of  the company’s Executive Council – the half-dozen executives who ran the company.  This added a technology voice to the most significant decisions made at HP. Having a seat at the table is important when worlds collide, and I will give many examples of this in later posts. The second was the decision to charter the senior technologists in the company to spend an entire day every quarter looking beyond their own business plans for new technologies and products that would have been dropped or gone unnoticed because they had not survived Stan Williams’ cold blooded calculation within a business silo.

Many other developments grew out of these Loose Cannon discussions including HP’s aggressive entry into open source software, supercomputing, and commercial printing.  Successfully bringing Loose Cannons into the fold really requires you to squarely face  two important issues.  The first concerns the role that organizational barriers play in affecting overall technology strategies, The second is why technologists don’t more often have a meaningful seat at the table in executive suites and boardrooms. More on how to deal with these issues later, but I will give you a hint right now: there are no clean solutions because worlds are in collision.

I arrived at HP long after Steve Wozniak sent his letter asking for permission to commercialize “hobbyist” computers (see my last post Proposition 13 and Innovation).  If  he and I had overlapped I wonder if he would have been one of my Loose Cannons and whether his letter would have been needed.

[1] “Nanocircuitry, Defect Tolerance and Quantum Computing: Architectural and Manufacturing Considerations” by R. Stanley Williams in Quantum Computing and Communications edited by Michael Brooks, Springer 1999.

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Proposition 13 and Innovation

September 2, 2009

Innovation works best not when worlds collide, but when they are shared. Sometimes sharing takes place because there are no good alternatives.

At one time the public schools in California were among the best in the nation. No more. In 1978 two-thirds of the voters, in what has become a chaotic practice of bypassing normal legislative channels to amend the state constitution, approved a tax reform referendum known as Proposition 13. Championed by a politician named Howard Jarvis, Proposition 13 or “The People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation,” capped property tax rates and required a 2/3 supermajority in both houses of legislature for any future tax increases.  The immediate effect of Prop 13 was a 57% decline in property tax revenues. Despite strong evidence that it is a root cause of the current fiscal crisis in California, Proposition 13 remains a wildly popular measure among Californians.

Less controversial is the impact that Proposition 13 had on the state’s public schools, which on the average lost half of their tax revenue. Before Proposition 13 and a ballot initiative known as Proposition 98 (which had the unintended effect of capping overall school expenditures) California’s per-student annual expenditures were about $400 above the national average.  By 2000, per-student spending had dropped to $600 below the national average. That trend continues, and today a declining percentage of personal income in California is directed to K-12 education.  A 2005 study by the Rand Corporation concluded: “As recently as the 1970s, California’s public schools were considered to be among the nation’s best. Today, however, there is widespread recognition that the schools are no longer top performers. As a consequence, many Californians share a growing sense of alarm about the ineffectiveness of their public education system and the generation of children whose educational needs are not being met.”[1]

This is a dismal assessment. As a former California resident who experienced firsthand the inadequacies of K-12 education in the state I don’t want to appear to be endorsing the gutting of public schools, but the 30-year decline in quality of California’s K-12 public school system had one positive effect on innovation in Silicon Valley, because there was a consequence of Prop 13 that no one could have foreseen.  It helped to flatten what could have easily become an exceedingly hierarchical technology community into a more or less free-flowing social network.

Engineers of all stripes who want quality education for their kids have only two alternatives. They can either fork over a lot of money to a private school or move into a more affluent community where parent associations can raise extra dollars to supplement inadequate public funding.  In both cases, engineers find themselves elbow-to-elbow with industry executives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and professors.  This is one way worlds are prevented from colliding in Silicon Valley.  It’s hard to maintain a strict hierarchy when – as they were in our local elementary school — CFO’s and programmers are working together on the PTA’s next silent auction.  Technologists and business leaders attend the same football games and school plays.  They mingle at holiday programs and parties and first-day-of-school orientations.

Of course, it’s not just schools that flatten the hierarchies of the Northern California technology community.  A young VLSI designer with a newly minted degree from Michigan might find himself seated behind former Sun CEO Scott McNealy at a San Jose Sharks hockey game because McNealy’s seats are in the stands, not a glassed-in corporate box. Sand Hill Road runs for four miles behind the Stanford University campus, so it is not unusual to see a partner in a legendary venture firm wandering the halls of the Gates Building and striking up a discussion with whatever graduate student happens by.  Technology innovators and business leaders serve together on boards of the Tech Museum and the Computer History Museum and the Exploratorium.  The excellent cafeteria at Google’s main Mountain View campus is a virtual soup of corporate leaders, academic celebrities, and undergraduate interns.  There are legendary meeting places.  Il Fornaio in Palo Alto serves breakfast, and sometimes a chance meeting at 9AM can turn into scribbles on napkin that in turn catch the attention of a retired Intel executive at the next table who is happy to spend a few minutes coaching the founders of a new startup.

The definitive answer to why this open culture is a competitive advantage can be found in Annalee Saxenian’s 1995 study of innovation Regional Advantage.[2] Everyone who is serious about building a culture of success should read it, and I am constantly amazed at the number of people leading strategic regional initiatives who are unaware of its existence.  In comparing the economic performance of Silicon Valley on the one hand and Boston’s Route 128 corridor on the other hand, Saxenian notes that social mixing is just one part of an open system of exchange that has not been successfully duplicated in business cultures where vertical integration and clear boundaries are common.  Decade after decade, the blurring of boundaries in Silicon Valley has given it an advantage in the rate of new start-ups and the speed with which new products can be brought to market.

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard were to some extent responsible for an open corporate culture that welcomed startups even from within the company’s ranks.  While rummaging through some files one day at HP, I came across a series of memos from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.  On April 28, 1976, Wozniak wrote: ”I am seeking a written release from HP to market a product based on circuits I designed over the last year.  The circuits were originally designed on my personal time for personal use (hobby)…I “lobbied” for a similar product idea within HP management…without success…I have no objection to licensing the circuits to HP if necessary for any reason.”

A few days later, HP’s General Counsel, replied: “We are happy to release this invention to you subject to a worldwide royalty-free license to Hewlett-Packard Company and its present licensees…”

Wozniak and Steve Jobs set up camp nearby and became part of an innovative explosion that benefited HP and the entire industry.

Digital Equipment Corporation was the closest thing to HP that existed on Route 128, but like many other local businesses its corporate culture was far less open to sharing intellectual property, information, and skills. When Jeffrey Kalb left Digital in 1987 to found a new computer company called MasPar, it was a blow to DEC.  Kalb moved from Boston to Silicon Valley and by implication away from Digital.

Even at this late date, it is still a subject of considerable interest in northern New Jersey, Atlanta, Austin, Raleigh, and Minneapolis how to recreate the innovative environment of California’s Route 101. These are all regions with great universities, access to capital and a track record of building successful businesses.  Atlanta leads in many of the traditional measures of innovation but today lacks even one major source of venture capital. New Jersey was the intellectual center of the telecommunications industry, but there is a wide social gulf between the remaining scientists at the central research labs and the gated mansions of Bedminster.  Like Route 128, Austin, Raleigh and Minneapolis grew around companies with hierarchical cultures. A lesson of looking at things through the WWC lens is that innovation works better when worlds are shared.  Easy social mixing – whether spurred by a common concern for local schools or simply blurred horizontal and vertical boundaries – builds trust and collaborative networks.

In case you think all this talk about culture is some sort of gauzy way to paint contrasts where none really exist, Jeffrey Kalb pointed out one of the enduring business advantages of shared worlds: “There are a large number of experienced people [in Silicon Valley] who have retired but are still active in the industry and are available as consultants, members of boards or directors or venture capitalists…There’s just about anything you want in this infrastructure.”

To the extent that large corporations mimic entire societies, there are sociological reasons why sharing worlds is important for innovation.  Open innovation helps, too.  More about these ideas in later posts.

[1] California’s K–12 Public Schools: How Are They Doing? By Stephen J. Carroll, Cathy Krop, Jeremy Arkes, Peter A. Morrison, Ann Flanagan, RAND Corporation, 2005.

[2] Regional Advantage by Analee Saxenian, Harvard University Press, 1994 (Revised 1995)

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