HP
Being Thrown Under The Bus: The Dilemma of Blame
This last week, I got pulled back into a Hewlett-Packard Enterprise ($HPE) news cycle. Last Thursday, the UK courts ruled there was fraud by Autonomy, their CEO and CFO related to its acquisition by HPE. When HPE wrote down $8.8 billion against the acquisition in 2012, HPE executive leadership got b
Finding Ways to Offer Underused Resources
I’m an innovation guy. It may not say so on my business card, but that’s what I do. I encourage people, whether inside HP or in my meetings with customers around the world, to accept that they and their product are going to have to change. No matter how popular and successful your work is, […]
The Zero-Tolerance Consumer
The designers and engineers who work at HP face many challenges in getting their ideas signed off on. It’s a long process from an idea to a finished prototype. Before any product can hit the market, it faces one final test. I take the prototype home, give it to my wife, and say, “Tell me […]
Is The Project Worth Pursuing?
What are your criteria for deciding that an idea is worth pursuing? We all have our own set of selection criteria, the first of which is usually looking for profits. However, selecting a course of action based solely on ROI can be limiting. If you are doing something really innovative, how on earth
Should You Use a Data-Driven Approach to Innovation?
The inspiration for innovation takes all forms. For some its music. For others its art. And for others its data. When I was CTO, Mark Hurd, the CEO at HP at the time, had a quote that was ingrained into everything the executive team did. The expectation was that as an executive you knew “your […]
The Permission to Innovate
Some people don’t believe that they can generate the ideas their companies need. A story from a few years ago, when HP acquired a small start-up, illustrates the reason behind this mind-set perfectly. As part of the process of introducing the new team to HP, I hosted a session and invited HP employe
Fight or Flight Against The Corporate Antibodies
I have a very simple reason for being passionate about pushing back (fight) against corporate antibodies. Nearly all great ideas require nerve, vision, and guts to get in motion. The corporate antibody is the first of many hurdles that you’ll need to push your idea past. If you can’t develop the ski
Is The Current Innovation Refresh Rate A Good Thing?
As the retired CTO of a major technology company, I was surrounded by visual clues that clearly indicate when a tech product is headed to the gadget graveyard. Most of the time, it’s hard to ignore these clues, because they are pretty obvious. I see them in meetings with my coworkers or customers wh
4 Questions New Leaders Should Ask
IDG (parent company for CIO, Computerworld, CSO, Infoworld, ITWorld and MACWorld) asked what advice I would give new leaders. At the moment, I didn’t think it was going to be that hard. But then they added a constraint. I had to do it in less than 5 minutes. So I shared what I did when […]
On NBC Discussing How Companies Can Be More Innovative (video)
Yesterday, I recorded two segments for NBC’s Press:Here that will appear on Sunday, April 8th @ 9:00 AM in SFO and then later on cable in New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Diego, Dallas, and Washington DC. In segment one, the questions focused on the stodginess of HP, the Palm a
