[link|www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020422S0024|Why not just any old standard of excellence will do]

By Frank Burge

When Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their partnership in 1939 in a Palo Alto garage, they did so with an initial capital investment of $538.

Much has been written about the HP Way, a standard of behavior that emphasized innovation, a respect for the individual and a culture that represented the best in all of us. Bill and Dave built a company where engineers wanted to work. There was something special about that place-stand tall, feel proud, it was family.

As I listened to the heated debates surrounding the HP-Compaq merger and talked to neighbors and former HP employees here in Silicon Valley, it became clear that the issue bothering many folks wasn't the merger itself but something else. It was about the end of an era, an end to the belief that it's important to be a great company to do business with, a great company to work for, a company that puts its people and principles first.

Apparently those old-fashioned beliefs have no place in today's struggle to please Wall Street and survive in the global economy. Last week the San Jose Mercury News reported that the total losses ($89.9 billion) of the Valley's 150 largest public companies in the past four quarters were equal to the combined profits of those companies for the past eight years. Tough times indeed.

The HP Way is about yesterday's culture. Now we live in a world where principles are tossed out the window and anything goes as long as it means making a buck.

The headlines keep us informed of the growing Enron/Andersen scandal and of Wall Street analysts offering stock-picking advice on public companies that are also clients of their firms' investment-banking operations. Then there's the latest "60 Minutes" report about the Enron deal that built a power plant in India and then sold that nation power at four times the price of what local, Indian-generated power cost. And as I understand it, the Enron architect of the move later resigned and cashed in $70 million in stock options.

It was a better world when we lived it the HP Way. But unfortunately, those days are gone forever.

I say:

We'd better try to bring them back. Our civilization can only survive so many Enrons and so many Microsofts. Let's start with a standard of truth and accountability. No longer let marketing shills dictate every facet of the business, even accounting. Let's respect the small entrepreneur, the true innovator and creator, instead of blindly worshipping some monopoly, corporate or government, that attains power. Let's respect the R&D developer, who actually invents things, rather than the speculator in intellectual property rights who tries to buy invention low and sell high. Let's esteem the engineer, who makes thing work, rather than the lying CEO who pumps up the company stock so he can sell it at a profit, while bleeding the company dry. Let's not define "excellence" so as to beg the question. Not all excellence is equal.

Let's strive for a kind of excellence that can't be reduced to a dollar figure. The kind of excellence that improves our way of life, increases our freedoms, keeps democracy strong, and gives us all cause for self respect. Not the kind that does nothing but rake scattered money into a tidy pile and then hide the pile. The point is to create wealth, not redistribute it.