by geophile | 2025-11-30 18:05:34+00:00
This seems like a good time to remind everyone of a letter by David Packard, to his employees. There is more morality, common sense and insightful business advice here than in any 1000 business titles you would care to name.

https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-107-david-packard-...

I think that OPs essay identifies that something bad happened at HP but completely misses what it was. Look at this quote:

Around 1997, when I was working for the General Counsel, HP engaged a major global consulting firm in a multi-year project to help them think about the question: “What happens to very large companies that have experienced significant growth for multiple successive years?”

OP says that the findings and recommendations included: "the decade long trend of double-digit growth was unlikely to continue", and "the company [should] begin to plan for much slower growth in the future."

OP then goes on to talk about fighting for resources for investments, a "healthy back and forth" on these tradeoffs, and then losing the "will to fight" following this report. "The focus became how not to lose".

Unlike OP, I did not work at HP. But I have seen up close startups, middle-sized companies, and huge companies, and the transitions among these states. So I feel justified in saying: OP has missed the point. And in particular, he makes no reference to that letter from David Packard.

Look at this quote from the letter:

I want to discuss why a company exists in the first place. ... why are we here? I think many people assume, wrongly, that a company exists simply to make money. While this is an important result of a company's existence, we have to go deeper and find the real reasons for our being. ... a group of people get together and exist as an institution that we call a company so they are able to accomplish something collectively which they could not accomplish separately. They are able to do something worthwhile—they make a contribution to society .... You can look around and still see people who are interested in money and nothing else, but the underlying drives come largely from a desire to do something else—to make a product—to give a service—generally to do something which is of value.

I think this is the essence of what it means to do useful and interesting work in any technical field. Unfortunately, there are many, many examples of companies that have lost their way, forgetting this key insight. HP was certainly one of them. I would argue that Google and Microsoft are examples too. Boeing, for sure.

And sadly, there are very, very few companies that actually embody Packard's ideas. I think that JetBrains is such a company, familiar to many HN readers. Another one that comes to mind, from a very different field, is Talking Points Memo -- an excellent website that does news reporting and analysis, mostly on US politics. It started as a "blogger in a bathrobe", and 25 years later, it is a small, independent news organization, supporting itself mostly through paid subscriptions by a very loyal readership.

To me, the saddest part of the essay is this:

In the last few years more and more business people have begun to recognize this, have stated it and finally realized this is their true objective.

(This is right before the "You can look around ..." section quoted earlier.) It seems to me that very, very few business people recognize the way to run a business, as outlined by Packard.