Kontextmaschine

28th November 2022

Post reblogged from Deep Learning State Machine with 27 notes

In the case of the Valley, you know, you can maybe start that with Hewlett and Packard and the famous HP Way — what they called management by walking around. No corner offices, shirt sleeves. They still had ties, but we took off the jacket. And this was in the 1950s. You know, Hewlett Packard was founded in a garage, an iconic garage startup in 1939. By the fifties, it’s a publicly traded company. It’s extremely successful.

And Hewlett and Packard, are very kind of self-consciously working against the Organization Man paradigm. That was corporate capitalism in the 1950s. So creating a culture where management and the rank and file engineers are all kind of on the same side is taking the culture of the engineering lab and transferring that into a corporation.
And it also was I think philosophically too, this was the high water mark of private sector unionization. People like Dave Packard were very much against unions. Just saw them as a sign that something’s wrong with a company if you can’t find a way to get along. And that instead that employees of all rank should be rewarded with stock options, they should have a stake in the ownership of the company. So it was a different model. And that kind of percolates through. There are a lot of HP veterans that go on to start venture firms, start other companies, and they bring that laid back California more sort of ostensibly egalitarian corporate culture with them.

Tagged: the california ideology amhist

Source: bloomberg.com