Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Review

A lesson plan for managers trying to make their own fame and fortune on an ever more competitive scale. -- San Francisco Chronicle

His tale of Hewlett-Packard's rise and fall recalls the time when, incredibly HP was cool. Malone chronicles how the two quickly outgrew what Packard called "that damn garage" and developed the HP Way, the cultural operating system standard for high tech companies. -- Wired

It's worth reflecting on how fine Bill and Dave's achievement really was. -- Newsweek

Malone has produced a biography, management guidebook, and business history, all in one. -- Businessweek

Mike Malone does the legacy of Hewlett and Packard a great service with this book. I hope it inspires a whole new generation of entrepreneurs to rise to the standards set by these two remarkable leaders. -- Jim Collins, author Good to Great, co-author Built to Last

Recounting the well-known HP stories and unearthing some new ones, his account of the two tech titans and the world they made has a fresh feel throughout. -- Washington Post

The book is the best account so far of the lives of the two men who started Silicon Valley and created many of its lasting traditions and institutions. -- San Jose Mercury News

Product Description

The definitive history of Hewlett-Packard and its legendary founders, based on unprecedented access to private archives

This is the most authoritative version ever of the most famous start-up story in business history. In 1938, working out of a small garage in Palo Alto, California, two young Stanford graduates named Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built their first product, an audio oscillator. It was the start not only of a legendary company but of an entire way of life in Silicon Valley—and, ultimately, our modern digital age.

Others have written about the rise of Hewlett-Packard, including Packard himself in a bestselling memoir. But acclaimed journalist Michael S. Malone is the first to get the full story, based on unlimited and exclusive access to corporate and private archives, along with hundreds of employee interviews.

Malone draws on his new material to show how some of the most influential products of our time were invented, and how a culture of innovation led HP to unparalleled success for decades. He also shows what was really behind the groundbreaking management philosophy—"the HP Way"—that put people ahead of products or profits.

There have been attempts in recent years to discredit the HP Way as soft and outdated. But Malone argues that the HP Way was a hard-nosed business philosophy that combined simple objectives, trust in employees to make the right choices, and ruthless self-appraisal. It created an innovative and ferociously competitive company—arguably the world’s greatest company.

This business adventure story will be perfect for entrepreneurs, young managers, and students, not to mention the tens of thousands of current and former HP employees.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Portfolio Hardcover (April 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1591841526
• ISBN-13: 978-1591841524
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #188,859 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most Admired Leaders, April 7, 2007

By	Charles H. House (Palo Alto, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The best book, by far, about the founders of the Hewlett-Packard company. Malone, with an insider's emotional connection and a polished journalistic style, has produced a warm, empathetic portrait of two remarkable men that will likely never be equaled. Malone embeds their story remarkably well in the context of the times, over a fifty-five year business span of twentieth-century America. Working with hitherto unavailable resources, both from the families and the Hewlett-Packard archives, this book dissects the character of the two men (all the harder for the very private, very shy dyslexic Hewlett) and establishes their worth and contribution in a way that, I suspect, many HP alumni will find incredibly accurate and compelling.

This is not a hagiography - in places, Malone observes that they did some things on occasion that they later would not tolerate in their employees, avowedly exhibiting a fake product at a trade show, for example. He chronicles some near-misses - learning the lessons of cash flow or ethical behavior or pricing strategies the hard way. And he puts their life evolution into context as well, noting that they did far more than "simply" build a great company - they became business statesmen, national statesmen, and valuable world scene philanthropy, learning all the while throughout long and productive lifetimes.

Importantly, Malone interprets Packard's own autobiography for the serious student of HP. Packard wrote a laconic austere account near the end of his life - Malone analyzes many passages and gives them far more liveliness than did Dave himself. Purists might quibble about a number of factual dates and places, but this is not intended as a definitive history - it is instead a monumental offering about a philosophy of business for which the details are better left somewhat sketchy in order to appreciate the tapestry that was composed.

At a time that HP has just become the largest (in revenue) high-tech player in the world, and it has been besmirched by a wayward CEO and a sad Board debacle over pretexting, this book will help restore the HP pride factor. It certainly has done so for me.

Maybe most importantly, Malone re-sets the bar for corporation leadership today to consider longer term perspective - including the distinct possibility that the bedrock tenets of this duo, with their belief in the worth, dignity, and innate creativity of individuals, are more apropos for the 21st century with its offshored, outsourced virtual teams than ever before.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent book!, April 12, 2007

By	S. Witten "niteflyer" (San Jose, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am an HP retiree so I have a particular bias here... I am also a great admirer of Mike Malone's writing and television work. You are free to take everything I say with a grain of salt...

I liked this book very much. It puts more meat on the bones of Packard's book "The HP Way". It rambles in places (HP "rambled" in places and at times... ex-HPers will understand that) but it's all in all very interesting. The book focuses on Bill and Dave -- the people and their years of building/managing HP from the days at Stanford to their deaths in the 1990's. Above all, Malone never forgets that the story of Bill & Dave and HP is the story of HP people -- as Malone as described in other places, "a company of den mothers and little league coaches."

If you are looking for a history of HP's memorable products and technical discussions about them, this is not the book for you. There are some stories about products but they are woven into the context of the bigger picture of HP at the time of the product's introduction or to illustrate the contribution to society the product made (e.g., the HP-35 calculator).

I especially enjoyed the beginning sections about Bill & Dave's childhoods and the early years at Stanford. I didn't know Bill was dyslexic and that was the source of both his genius and his shyness. I wish Malone had provided some more information about Lucille Packard and Flora Hewlett (both of whom were very important to HP -- especially during the early years) and their family lives.

Malone leaves out some things though... John Minck (who's quoted several times in the book) once sent me a version of the HP Corporate Objectives dated prior to 1966. That version that has "Contribution" as #1 and "Profit" as #2. He told me that Dave put the squash on this right away and elevated "Profit" to #1 resulting in the version we know and love today. One more proof of the point that Bill & Dave were businessmen not fishers of men. Enlightened though they were; they were tough and I personally witnessed one instance of Dave firing someone on the spot.

Malone also doesn't mention Dave's "Eleven Simple Rules" anywhere in the book. To me, the three documents that define the HP Way are "The HP Way" (it begins "We have trust and respect for individuals" ... not Dave's book with the same title), the HP Corporate Objectives (1966 - 1990) and Dave's "Eleven Simple Rules". I sent an email about this to Malone and he has promised to rectify this oversight by writing an article about them for either the Wall Street Journal or his regular ABC News column.

"Bill and Dave" is a fine book and you will learn much from it. The book describes the HP Way as an imprecise roadmap but also places it in a context with the life and times of it's two progenitors. Malone doesn't make the HP Way any more precise but he certainly makes it much better
understood. I'm glad he took the time to write "Bill and Dave" -- it's a story that needs telling and is worth preserving.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A "must read" for business leaders and technologists, January 8, 2008

By	John Erisman (Boise, ID USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating account of what is (or at least was) one of the most admired and respected companies, not just for its product reputation, but for its corporate culture and management style that was unique in its day, and copied by many others since.

The book chronicles how Hewlett and Packard started a bare-bones company in a one-car garage with a single product and grew it into a multi-billion dollar global corporation. Malone looks at their childhood years and how their unique life experiences shaped their personal characters and values, as well as the culture of the company that bears their name. It was most interesting to see how these men, friends from their Stanford years, but with very different, though complementary, personal styles, learned to work together in an attitude of complete trust, and to instill in their company a set of values known popularly as the HP Way. Malone, thankfully, does not view Bill and Dave through rose-colored glasses, but is realistic about their personal foibles as well. Numerous examples are provided to show how they learned from their mistakes and went on to re-invent themselves several times over in response to issues of growth, to changing product needs and to the business climate - all while keeping the core set of guiding values in tact. And it was encouraging to be reminded, that despite the enormous fame and wealth that came to them, they never forgot their beginnings, but became almost as well-known for their philanthropic efforts.

Although the majority of the book is devoted to the glory days of Hewlett and Packard, Malone also discusses HP under the subsequent leadership of John Young, Lew Platt, the recent disastrous six years under Carly Fiorina in which the HP culture was almost destroyed, and attempts to "fix" things under its current president, Mark Hurd.

This book was of particular interest to me, an HP employee from 1980 - 2000 in both its instrument and printer businesses, and provided a trip down nostalgia lane since I knew many of the players from the earlier days. Though not without its frustrations, HP was a great experience for me, especially in marked contrast to my earlier career in the aerospace industry.

If I could wish for something more, it would be to include a little more about Agilent, the 1999 spin-off instrument business which was, after all, HP's core business during the first few decades. But overall, the book is eminently readable and highly recommended to anyone interested in business, technology or ethics.