Kindest of Silicon Valley's pioneers passes on

Palo Alto, Jan 17

William Hewlett, one of the last original Silicon Valley high-tech pioneers, died peacefully in his sleep on Friday morning at age 87. Lifelong partner David Packard had passed away in 1996.

The two founded Hewlett-Packard (HP) in a small garage in Palo Alto in 1938 with just $ 538, an investment they lived to see flourish into a $ 50 billion-a-year global computer and electronics gear giant.

More important to both men than the incredible corporate success and personal wealth they acquired, HP became one of the most revered and respected companies in the world. `The HP Way' corporate culture they defined and instilled in their workforce remains unequaled.

The HP Way embellished the founders' basic beliefs about managing a company--disdain of strict hierarchy and formality, admiration for individual creativity and initiative, and trust in employees. It also includes concepts such as respect for the individual, contribution to the customer and the community, integrity, teamwork and innovation.

"I guess what I'm most proud of is that we really created a way to work with employees, let them share in the profits and still keep control of it. When I was born there was no money, so we said we don't want to borrow money. People who'd borrowed money had gotten into trouble. We also said we did not want to run a hire-and-fire operation, but rather a company based on a loyal and dedicated work force," Hewlett said in an interview published earlier on the website of the San Jose Tech Museum he and Packard had helped fund.

Apple Computer was inspired by The HP Way, said founder Steve Jobs, who got a summer job at HP after calling Bill Hewlett at home. "What I learned that summer at Bill and Dave's company was the blueprint we used for Apple. Today marks the passing of their era, but their spirit lives on in every company in this valley."

One legend has it that once Hewlett was walking through the engineering lab one day and came across a locked tool cabinet. He cut opens the lock and vowed he never again wanted to see the tools employees needed to do their jobs locked up.

The number of stories about Hewlett showing up to help ordinary engineers figure out that the problems they were trying to solve were endless. "Bill had a great reputation for walking into a junior engineer's office, putting his feet up on the desk and saying, `Tell me what you're doing, tell me what we should be doing,'" said Jerry Porras, a Professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The HP Way is not unchanged. During the 1990s, the HP Way suffered much erosion. As Packard put it once, "The problem with the HP Way is it that it can mean anything people want it to mean."

In December 1999, Carly Fiorina, HP's new CEO and Chairwoman, rewrote the HP Way into a doctrine called `The Rules of the Garage.' She wanted HP's workers to return to the spirit of how Hewlett and Packard founded the company. "The HP Way had come to mean a set of bad habits--for example, being slow. In the 90s it came to mean, `We can't do anything unless we all agree,'" Fiorina explained.

The kind one

Of the two, Hewlett was the soft-spoken kind-hearted engineer you would rarely see dressed in anything more than casual shirt-sleeves. Lacking virtually all pretense, Hewlett delighted in working on new products side-by-side with employees or playing penny ante poker with them during breaks.

"Bill Hewlett was a great and gentle man. We, as stewards of his legacy, will cherish and nurture Bill's bright spirit of invention, remembering and celebrating the rich heritage that he and Dave entrusted us with," commented Fiorina upon learning of the death of the company's co-founder. Today, Fiorina, like the founders themselves, still sits in a cubicle, not an office.

Added Lewis Platt, former CEO and Chairman, HP, now CEO of Kendall-Jackson Wine Estates, "Bill was one of the true pioneers and giants of the electronics industry. He had a combination of inquisitiveness, creativity, clear thinking and compassion, which you seldom find in a single individual. He will certainly be missed but he leaves behind a legacy which will not soon be forgotten."

From the beginning, Hewlett had a strong ability to understand how new technologies could become a successful product in the marketplace. In 1968, for example, after HP had introduced a desktop scientific calculator, he asked HP engineers to design something like it that would be small enough to fit in his shirt pocket. The result was the HP-35, the world's first handheld scientific calculator. When it was introduced in 1972, it made the slide rule obsolete.

A humble beginning

William Redington Hewlett was born May 20, 1913 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1913, but at age three moved to California where his father was a Professor of Medicine at Stanford. He met and became friends with Packard while attending Stanford as an engineering student. Both graduated in 1934. Packard went to work for General Electric in New York and Hewlett went on to earn a master's degree at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A few years later, both were back in Palo Alto, where their former mentor, Stanford Professor Frederick Terman encouraged them to start their own company. Hewlett and Packard formalized their partnership on New Year's Day 1939 with a coin toss to decide the company name. Had Packard won, PH would no doubt be a household name in industry and consumer markets alike.

In the garage behind the house they rented in downtown Palo Alto, the two built their first products. "We were a couple of young guys, just out of Stanford. We thought we were pretty smart, and we thought we could contribute something."

And contribute they did. The first real product success was Hewlett's audio oscillator, a device to test sound equipment. Walt Disney bought eight for the film `Fantasia.' The device was based on Hewlett's Stanford graduate thesis on practical applications for the new electrical-engineering technology of negative feedback.

Following that they built all kinds of systems in their struggle to get off the ground. "In the beginning, we did anything to bring in a nickel. We had a bowling lane foul line indicator. We had a thing that would make a urinal flush automatically as soon as a guy came in front of it. We had a shock machine to make people lose weight," Hewlett recalled. Later, HP would offer thousands of different products, from calculators to medical systems to simple diodes and PCs to printers.

The two entrepreneurs managed to make a modest profit in their first year in business. The company has remained profitable in each of the following 61 years.

World War two interrupted Hewlett's work at the company as he served as an Army Signal Corps officer. He returned to HP in 1947 and was named VP. He was elected Executive VP in 1957, President in 1964 and CEO in 1969.

Hewlett, adhering to the company's strict HP Way policy on retiring at age 65, stepped down as HP's President in 1977 and CEO the following year. He remained Vice Chairman until 1987. Packard retired as Chairman in September 1993.

Giving back

Like Packard, Hewlett became one of the world's most generous philanthropists, donating more than $ 9 billion of his wealth to charity, including the Flora & William Hewlett Foundation he had set up.Hewlett, who loved to leave the office and go fishing with Packard, used his foundation to fund river and wilderness preservation program. His foundation will see its assets triple from $ 3 billion to more than $ 9 billion following the founder's death. It will rank second only to the $ 13 billion Lucile & David Packard Foundation. The two organizations will have a combined annual budget of nearly a billion dollars.

Hewlett's foundation, like Hewlett himself will support the arts, global population research and improved US-Latin American relations. His modesty made him stubbornly refuse to having his name put on buildings he helped erect.

Just as their garage start-up inspired legions of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond, their two foundations are the models for Silicon Valley charity. Many of the area's wealthy, and by extension Microsoft Chief Bill Gates, have followed in the footsteps of Hewlett and Packard in transferring large chunks of the wealth they will never be able to spend to charitable foundations.

"Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started the second great revolution in American philanthropy by the establishment of their two sizable foundations," says Kirk Hanson, who teaches ethics and corporate responsibility at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore cited both Hewlett and Packard when he announced the establishment of his own $ 5 billion foundation last month. "They were the first couple of guys to make a real fortune here in the electronics industry.

Both of them set good examples of giving it back to the community and the world."

Hewlett and Packard made personal, combined donations of more than $ 300 million to Stanford University alone. They contributed $ 77.4 million in October 1994 for the completion of a state-of-the-art science and engineering complex. In 1994, each gave $ 12.5 million for the establishment of a Frederick Terman Fellowship to honor the Stanford Professor who was their mentor.

Life of accomplishments

Hewlett served as a Director of Chrysler, Chase Manhattan Bank, FMC, and the Overseas Development Council. In the 1960s, during the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, he was a member of the President's General Advisory Committee on Foreign Assistance Programs and the President's Science Advisory Committee. He was co-founder of the American Electronics Association.

Hewlett was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed skiing, mountain climbing, hunting and fishing. Along with Packard, he owned extensive cattle-ranching operations in California and Idaho. Hewlett was committed to environmental issues, particularly to preserving California's Lake Tahoe and Sierra regions. In his later years, he pursued interests in Botany, Photography and History.

In 1985, President Ronald Reagan awarded Hewlett the National Medal of Science, America's highest scientific honor.