Managing All the Geeks

You've spoken about wanting HP to place fewer, bigger bets. That means saying "no" to a lot of projects. How do you do that and still keep your teams engaged?
It's a performance culture. People need to be in an environment where it's a little bit competitive. Resources are something you have to compete for. If people have to go through the process of selling their idea internally, that's a very healthy checkpoint and we do it all the time. In the labs now, when people come forth with proposals, it's a zero-sum game. We have a finite amount of money that we spend on research. The ultimate goal is to be right where we place our bets, and this is a process that allows us to use the collective intelligence of the organization in a competitive situation that really gets the juices flowing. That's pretty healthy.

For people who may think of HP as a printer company, what's the best-kept secret?
The breadth of our portfolio. If you think about what we have today, we're No. 1 in PCs around the world. We've got incredibly sexy new PC offerings, everything from our high-end supergaming machines to the mini-notebook we just announced. We've got the world's leading automation technology for running big data centers. We've got a growing business in outsourcing people's IT infrastructure, an advanced set of blade server and blade storage offerings, and strong positions in all of our enterprise businesses.

Some people say HP's products have been better than its marketing. Is that fair?
I think it is. We're a great engineering company. We've done a great job with our products … [But] we need to get the word out on more of our capabilities and the breadth of our portfolio.

You've talked about how the environment has become a priority for HP. A lot of companies are saying that these days, so how do we know HP's commitment is real?
There is a bandwagon effect and everybody jumps on if it's hot. The way I think about our environmental activities—and this is another area in which we've done a poor job of communicating—is, we need to improve our carbon footprint. But it's not a separate activity. The things we need to do are also things we need to do for business reasons, to improve the performance and reliability of our products, and reduce their costs … Consider our conversation today [which is taking place on HP's HALO videoconferencing system]. It saved me a trip to New York or you a trip to California. So we can communicate more, have a much smaller carbon footprint, and everybody wins.

© 2008