Bill & Dave's Memos – Edited by Albert Yuen  Author's LinkedIn profile

"In 1996.. while working as an engineering manager at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories... I wanted to find out for myself how Bill and Dave ran the company on a daily basis. So I started to spend my off-hour time at the HP archives, where much of Bill and Dave's original memos and speeches are kept. As I pored through the boxes of memos, I gained a deeper appreciation of the breadth of the management style that came to be know as the HP Way... Bill and Dave managed to preserve the spirit of the HP Way from the garage to a global operation over the 40+ years that they directly managed the corporation. If you take the time to learn about the HP Way, you will see that it constitutes some very sound management practices that are beyond sentimental emotions of days gone by." --from the author's introduction

February 2007. ISBN-10: 1424327814

Some examples: Hewlett announcing the nine-day fortnight. Packard's forceful memo on MBWA and the open door policy. Hewlett on why HP stopped expanding in the Bay Area. Packard on why a company exists.

Packard talks to HP managers about basic business principles (1974)

After a disappointing year in 1973, Packard embarked on a series of talks to groups of managers. "...they show an 'unvarnished' Packard -- with his temper up, his irritability clearly in evidence, and his motivational juices flowing... The impact of these talks was immense and immediate." https://www.hpalumni.org/PackardAnalyzesFinancialReport.pdf includes Dave Kirby's background note and typewritten transcripts of two meetings. [Thanks to member Leo Forget.]  

"For some reason, we've got this talking about one of our objectives is to increase the share of the market... it leads you to the wrong kind of decisions ...we have a rather significant share of the market in CATV amplifiers, and we'd be just a hell of a lot better off if we hadn't ever touched that business and if our share was zero."

"...I don't understand why the hell we have finished goods inventories going up 49% when we had sales going up only 38%... What the hell are we keeping all this goddamn stuff in finished inventory for?"

"...if you've got to price your products too low to generate a profit to get an adequate level of business, you're making the wrong product..."

"...we found around the company there are all kinds of things that people just didn't know about -- and you can't manage something if you don't know about it."

"...a growth company is not growing in size; it's growing in earnings potential..."