Talk-show host Hugh Hewitt is proabably as good and energetic an interviewer as you’ll get to hear. He can disembowel a pompous MSMer as quick as a Mexican immigrant can dress a chicken in a meat-packing plant.
But he’s also good at interviewing to bring his interviewee out, as in this radio interview with Michael S. Malone, author of Bill and Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company. The way Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard did it came to be called the HP Way:
It’s called the HP way, and it’s several things. One of it is it’s a culture built on trust, all the way from the two partners trusting each other completely, down through the entire organization, where you trust people to make their own decisions, and you put the employees first, and innovation right behind, and you drive your way forward by empowering your people to do the right thing. It’s a powerful culture. It’s unbelievable at its peak.
Above all, Bill and Dave had no nostaglia for buildings or for products.
If a product stopped being profitable, they got rid of it. They got rid of buildings, they changed locations. The only continuity in their management career, and the reason they ended up on top, and are as famous as they are, is because they put their employees first.
This has become a commonplace today. We all say that a company is only as good as its people. But back in the heyday of the high industrial age, people thought that capital, resources, and labor went together to make prosperity. Now we know that resources and capital are second-tier. It is human capital that is everything.
So then we come to the newspaper industry. Says Malone:
A couple of years ago, I got into a lot of trouble, because I was maybe the first guy to actually come out and say newspapers are all going to die. And luckily, Rupert Murdoch came along two weeks later, and took all the flak from me with his speech. But what set me off was I realized I hadn’t read a newspaper in six months.
In the newspaper they are hanging onto their product, the physical newspaper, and the printing plant out back like grim death.
And what I noticed reading this story about Lileks and the Star Tribune was, and I’m an old newspaper man, 30 years writing for newspapers now, it’s that they’re still attached to the printing plant out back, to the trucks that deliver the newspapers, to the linoleum in the newsroom.
And what are they doing? They are giving their senior talent golden parachutes and sending them out the door. (Of course, they probably have no option, since newspapers are union shops.) They are hanging onto the legacy hardware and sending the talent away.
Malone went over to the business school at Oxford University and he gave them a speech.
I gave a big speech on entrepreneurship, and the power of entrepreneurship, and how I thought it was the single most important phenomenon of modern times, and that entrepreneurship needed to be cultivated. It was the source of all the new jobs in the world, the source of almost all the innovation, and yet entrepreneurs had no constituents.
It’s the great issue of our times. The entrepreneurial model is changing the face of the workplace, but government is still doing the command-and-control thing.
Sooner or later, something’s got to give.
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