From here:
When Carly Fiorina became CEO of Hewlett-Packard Company in 1999, one of her first moves was to study Bill Hewlett’s and Dave Packard’s writings. With the help of her executive committee, she compared the founders’ original management principles with the way HP operates today and quickly excised the parts that were no longer relevant. “Preserve the best, and reinvent the rest,” became the cry.
They produced the ‘Rules of the Garage’. These are given in the HP poster above as well as below:
- Believe you can change the world.
- Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
- Know when to work alone and when to work together.
- Share tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
- No politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage).
- The customer defines a job well done.
- Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
- Invent different ways of working.
- Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
- Believe that together we can do anything.
- Invent.
I like the phrase ‘preserve the best and reinvent the rest’. Unintentionally in change programs this can easily become ‘ignore the best and copy the rest (from others)’ which hardly ever works…
Picture credit here.
Steps & Leaps 