Leo T. reviewed Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company on + 1775 more book reviews
The author is a journalist, long reporting on technology, and thus well suited to write about HP. The biography emphasizes their business skills and includes an appendix: Management and Leadership Lessons from Bill and Dave.
The author obviously had entree with the company and the families. The photos are well chosen.
There is one chapter on Carly Fiona's disastrous leadership, but the book is mostly about 1939-1989.
"When they had started HP, Franklin Roosevelt was president, Palo Alto was a town of 5,000 souls, and the world's most powerful computer, Harvard's Mark I, was fifty feet long, five feet tall, weighed five tons, and was capable of about three computations per second. When Bill and Dave left the leadership of Hewlett-Packard in 1977, Jimmy Carter was president, Palo Alto had grown to a population of 50,000, and the newly introduced Intel 8086 (whose descendants would power HP personal computers) was the size of a fingernail and capable of 4 million computations per second.
Few high-tech executives had ever led their companies through so much technological and societal change. And it is hard to imagine how anyone will ever do so. In the Addison garage, the two young men worked in a world of vacuum tubes, radios, and slide rules; as old men, they retired into a world of semiconductors, the early Internet, and personal computers--much of it their creation.
Just as remarkably, Bill and Dave bookended their years at the company with intervals of spectacular creativity: their first years and their last were arguably the most innovative for the two men. On the day Bill Hewlett stepped down as CEO of HP, he was not only the most vital person at the company, he was also, as evidenced by both the Nine-Day Fortnight and the HP-35 calculator, the most innovative as well. No one has come close to matching that achievement since."
Endnotes, index.
The author obviously had entree with the company and the families. The photos are well chosen.
There is one chapter on Carly Fiona's disastrous leadership, but the book is mostly about 1939-1989.
"When they had started HP, Franklin Roosevelt was president, Palo Alto was a town of 5,000 souls, and the world's most powerful computer, Harvard's Mark I, was fifty feet long, five feet tall, weighed five tons, and was capable of about three computations per second. When Bill and Dave left the leadership of Hewlett-Packard in 1977, Jimmy Carter was president, Palo Alto had grown to a population of 50,000, and the newly introduced Intel 8086 (whose descendants would power HP personal computers) was the size of a fingernail and capable of 4 million computations per second.
Few high-tech executives had ever led their companies through so much technological and societal change. And it is hard to imagine how anyone will ever do so. In the Addison garage, the two young men worked in a world of vacuum tubes, radios, and slide rules; as old men, they retired into a world of semiconductors, the early Internet, and personal computers--much of it their creation.
Just as remarkably, Bill and Dave bookended their years at the company with intervals of spectacular creativity: their first years and their last were arguably the most innovative for the two men. On the day Bill Hewlett stepped down as CEO of HP, he was not only the most vital person at the company, he was also, as evidenced by both the Nine-Day Fortnight and the HP-35 calculator, the most innovative as well. No one has come close to matching that achievement since."
Endnotes, index.
