At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
David Packard's HP Way: Customer Obsession, Contribution, Self-Funded Growth, and Quality
- Senra opens with Packard's view that a company exists to contribute something unique and improve lives rather than merely make money, while still demanding performance and customer satisfaction second to none.
- Packard's early life, including the horse his father wouldn't let him quit, his coach's teamwork lesson, and Professor Fred Terman at Stanford, shaped both his determination and the founding of HP.
- Packard's time at GE taught him that personal communication must back up written instructions, which became management by walking around, and HP started in Bill Hewlett's garage before the founders knew their product.
- HP financed growth from profits and avoided long-term debt because Packard saw in the Great Depression that borrowers lost everything, and he warned against short-term, quarterly-earnings thinking that cuts R&D.
- Packard stressed differentiated products rather than me-too copies, a focused set of complementary products, and meticulous quality, illustrated by HP's Japanese unit achieving a failure rate 400 times better than the company's own.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAsk what you can contribute, not just how to succeed
Packard said a company's real reason for being is offering something unique and improving lives, and that contribution fed a cycle of greater success and greater giving.
Personal communication must back up written instructions
At GE, Packard fixed failing tubes by working on the factory floor with the workers, which he said was the genesis of management by walking around at HP.
Avoid long-term debt and grow from earnings
After seeing his father's bankruptcy records during the Great Depression, Packard concluded that firms that borrowed were foreclosed on, so HP financed growth from profits for more than half a century.
Don't build me-too products
Packard and Hewlett refused to merely copy products on the market, and Senra connects this to Edwin Land, Steve Jobs on Netbooks, and Jeff Bezos on differentiated businesses.
Focus on complementary products and do the best with present opportunities
HP's wartime instruments all measured and tested electronic equipment, and doing that well let the company move into computers, which made up about $20 billion of sales by 1994 from none in 1964.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
4 quotesThis is why I think about founders just as one giant conversation you and I are having on the history of entrepreneurship that's just spread over, has to be separated in episodes, but it's just one conversation, right?
— David Senra
And I think that's another example of something you and I see in these books over and over again, that you have to do the best with the opportunity that's in front of you.
— David Senra
He's gonna tell you these little stories, these little anecdotes, and from there you'll infer the lessons that he's trying to impart to you.
— David Senra
And because Warren has hacked away at the unessential, all that is left is simplicity, and his pitch is simple.
— David Senra
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
