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Ultimately,
key to ezboard.com’s abiding success and exponential growth in a highly competitive field is its focus on community-building as its most important value above everything.
Success Model: Hewlett-Packard Co.
In beginning of company's history, founders did not focus on growth per se, but focused instead on manufacturing quality products. As HP grows, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard create a management style that forms basis of HP's famously open corporate culture and influences how scores of later technology companies will do business. Dave practices a management technique — eventually dubbed "management by walking around" —, which is marked by personal involvement, good listening skills, and recognition that "everyone in an organization wants to do a good job.” As managers, Bill and Dave run company according to principle later called management by objective — communicating overall objectives clearly and giving employees flexibility to work toward those goals in ways that they determine are best for their own areas of responsibility. HP also establishes its open door policy — open cubicles and executive offices without doors — to create an atmosphere of trust and mutual understanding. The open door policy encourages employees to discuss problems with a manager without reprisals or adverse consequences. Bill and Dave make other important management decisions: providing catastrophic medical insurance, using first names to address employees (including themselves), and throwing regular employee parties and picnics. .In 1957, these guidelines became encapsulated within a vision statement known as 'Hewlett Packard Vision'. As part of vision statement, values statement HP Way focused on a 'belief in our people’, which incorporated Confidence in and respect for our people as opposed to depending upon extensive rules, procedures and so on; which depends upon people to do their job right (individual freedom) without constant directives. ('The HP Way') Over years, HP Way has taken on image of Apostles' Creed: a shared statement of beliefs, but one that can be interpreted in many different ways in a broad, catholic sense. It is almost as though its shared symbolic image is more important than living it as a shared reality. One senior manager called it an 'an assumed culture'. This perhaps is its strength: as a corporate ideology, it allows for different interpretations of its words. On May 3, 2002, HP and Compaq officially merged, beginning operations as one unified company. The new HP serves more than one billion customers across 162 countries, and is a leading global provider of products, technologies, solutions, and services to consumers and businesses. The company’s offerings span IT infrastructure, personal computing and access devices, global services and imaging and printing. In this age where large corporations are coming under increasing moral scrutiny, HP has come out relatively clean. The Packard Foundation is world’ largest corporate foundation with grant awards totalled approximately $230 million in 2002. Carly Fiorina, its CEO, is respected in world of business, it is respected abroad, and it has no antitrust suits against it. As Ms. Fiorina remarked, “Our bodyguards carry no Uzis.”
Bio: Janet K. Ilacqua is a freelance writer based in Tracy, California. She specializes in academic writing and ghostwriting of books and manuals for individuals and small businesses. For more information about her services, check her website at http://www.writeupondemand.com.
