Sitting in the hall watching HP CEO Meg Whitman deliver a speech to EMEA customers and partners at the vendor’s recent Discover 2012 event in Frankfurt, I was struck by how many times she sought to reassure and enthuse the audience by reminding them of the company’s longevity and history in the IT industry.
Obviously, at a time of turmoil, it makes sense to remind the people who are reliant on your company to deliver their IT or their livelihood that your business is not some fly by night, will-o-the-wisp outfit likely to sink at the first sign of choppy waters. Reassurance is the name of the game, hence the references to HP’s history and its size, the implication being it would take a brave person to seriously bet against a $120 billion business that has been in existence for 73 years.
Whitman referred to the company’s "long legacy" of partner relationships and trust. Customers wanted the company "to win", she claimed, because they "deeply appreciate the benefits you get from HP in an industry characterised by increasing consolidation and increasing change". Yes, at a time of consolidation and change, it is always good to have a long-established company around to provide a reassuring presence.
At one point in her address she evoked the two founders of the company and made the telling comment that it was "hard to kill founder DNA". I noticed that she also referred quite early on in her speech to HP by its old name, Hewlett-Packard, when she stated: "Innovation is alive and well at Hewlett-Packard." I wondered if this might be a deliberate strategy although she went back to calling it HP for a while after that. However, later on, Whitman again referred to the company as Hewlett-Packard on a number of occasions.
I didn’t count the number of times she did this but it struck me as potentially significant, especially when you consider how much time, energy and resource the company has expended in rebranding itself as HP in a bid to move beyond its heritage. I don’t know whether this was a conscious effort on Whitman’s part to reconnect the company with the era of Bill Hewlett and David Packard, but it definitely made the connection in my mind.
And it may have been just me but when I heard Whitman utter the words "Hewlett-Packard" during her speech I was struck by how much more business-like, distinguished and reassuring they sounded than plain old HP. Again, the connection seemed to be made to a time when the company wasn’t racked with upheaval, rotating CEOs, strategic reversals, reorganisations, massive write-downs, you get the picture.
This is probably the point where I’m tempted to start writing glibly about Whitman trying to go back to the future but I’m not sure whether it’s as simple as that. Even if she wanted to, I don’t think HP can ever really be Hewlett-Packard again. Whitman might be right in saying it’s not possible to kill founder DNA but it can be switched off or deactivated when a company evolves in a different way. What she can do is reactivate traces of the culture and values buried within the company’s DNA that came from its founders.
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