HP went wrong years ago

Recent problems with HP (board members social engineering each other, managers going after whistle blowers, board members and employees being followed, taped, phone-tapped, to name a few) seem to suggest something bad has happened the last few months, something the instantaneously and suddenly transformed this giant teddy bear into a velociraptor.

I beg to differ. The slippery slope downward started earlier, much earlier. Recent events seem to be just a natural progression.

Back in 2000 I worked on the e-speak team, helping to formulate and implement its security framework. The team I worked with was great. Most seemed to be bright, passionate, and eager to change the world.

But HP did nothing much to promote it. At least not successfully.

At lunch we used to go to the main HP cafeteria, across campus in Cupertino. We used to walk indoors through a maze of endless HP cube landscapes. This walk was like a tourist tour of HP. Most of HP’s businesses units were represented in these cubes.

Over the year I was at HP, I noticed the attitude change as we navigated the rows of cubes. In the beginning, there were happy faces, posters, motivational banners, pimped out cubes, you name it. There was a spirit. Perhaps this was the vaunted HP spirit.

In the throes of the Agilent break-out, things were very different. The rows of cubes were silent. The banners had gone. I even think the lights had been dimmed. The friends we had made during the year — long-time employees all of them — told us of the shift away from the HP way. People were now more concerned about watching their backs. I heard there were snitchers everywhere. I heard you could now get fired for criticizing management.

This was and still is so incomprehensible. How was it possible to reduce one of the most loyal and team-directed set of employees in the valley into a bunch of suspicious, whining, job-hopping people in less than six-seven months? For a company of HP’s size, that is truly remarkable.