The great misconception about the success of Hewlett Packard is that it was populated by technical nerds. Nothing could be further from the truth. Technology did play a part; however, Hewlett Packard’s success came from the fact that a majority of the workforce were graduates from the social scientist side of the house. This discovery in the 1980’s was quite a shock to the establishment which prided itself on leading-edge technologies.
Before Carly Fiorina, who profoundly misunderstood the essence of Hewlett Packard, destroyed the core values of the company, thus forcing out these very people who had been the major force in the understanding of the company and the implementing of the aforementioned technologies, there were significant discoveries made about people and their abilities to work together and achieve ground-breaking results.
I had a staff of programmers and had been interested in improving productivity through Total Quality Control . . boring, huh 😊 . I stumbled upon the Subarctic Survival Situation, a group dynamics exercise which was used to help people work together to achieve better results. I won’t bore you with the details, but here are the results:
After administering the exercise fifty plus times, we discovered that any group which used certain techniques and situated themselves in certain ways outperformed all other groups by gigantic and significant margins. From a numerical perspective, these groups performed two and half times better than the best individual result across all fifty plus groups.
I applied those techniques across all the departments that I managed over the next thirty years. Of course, these were the type of people that were purged by Carly. Fortunately, I left before she came on board and used her savvy to sow dissension and mistrust in the company . . sparking an exodus of massive proportions.
Nevertheless, this was miracle two in my lifetime.