Business Week - a magazine I used to read, still love, but don’t have time to subscribe to anymore (and quoted in twice!) - just picked its Business Person of the Year.
No, it’s not Steve Jobs. Not Sergey Brin or Larry Page. It’s not Rupert Murdoch or even Bill Gates. It’s certainly not Mark Zuckerberg… or the dudes that invented Twitter.
The winner, this year, was “boring old Hewlett Packard’s” Mark Hurd. I won’t lie, I love being involved in startups but sometimes it’s worth noting that simplicity and focus will usually beat out far-fetched concepts that are not really businesses and grab the spotlight for a day but then fizzle away.
If you are building a company these days, get step out of the echo chamber (and consider spending more time reading Memeorandum.com than TechMeme.com) and get a sense of what’s happening in the real world to climb to the top.
For the fiscal year ended Oct. 31, sales rose 13.7% to $104.3 billion, and earnings jumped 17% to $7.3 billion. Those numbers have translated into sharp gains for investors too: For calendar-year 2007, the Palo Alto (Calif.) company’s shares rose 23% to $51.36, compared with a 13% gain for IBM and a 2% decline for Dell. “Businesses at HP that were problematic have been cleaned up,” says Roger Kay, president of market researcher Endpoint Technologies Associates. “It shows the whole company is doing well.”
No wonder BusinessWeek editors and readers have selected Hurd 2007 Businessperson of the Year. The low-key executive, who has quietly cleaned up a mighty mess at the venerable Silicon Valley bellwether, beat out some big names on our list of top managers, including tech neighbor Steve Jobs and media mogul Rupert Murdoch. While legitimate arguments can be made for many of the names on our list (BusinessWeek.com, 1/2/08), Hurd stands out for his remarkable skill navigating the intensely competitive and complex computer business. During his three-year tenure, HP has become a rare example of a tech company succeeding in the delicate balancing act of selling to both consumers and corporations.
Hurd, 50, is a classic example of a no-nonsense operator hammering away at a struggling business to get it moving in the right direction again. The marching orders: squeeze out costs and improve efficiency. When Vyomesh Joshi, who leads HP’s printer business, told his boss he was moving the entire team that works on black-and-white laser printers from Boise to China, where most of that product’s sales potential lies, he got Hurd’s enthusiastic approval, recalls Joshi.
Taking a page from Jack Welch’s book, HP has become more disciplined and pulled out of businesses where the company isn’t the No. 1 or No. 2 player, such as digital cameras. “The really big thing for us is to have built a long-term plan and long-term strategy for the company, and we stayed on track with that,” says Hurd.
Indeed, a lot went right for Hurd and HP in 2007. With a 19.6% worldwide share of the PC market, HP stayed firmly at the top of the heap, according to researcher IDC. (Dell, which lost the lead position to HP in 2006, currently has a second-ranked share of 15.2%.) How has HP managed to turn around a business that was hemorrhaging just a few years ago? It embraced a strategy known inside the company as “decommoditization,” or, in plain language, casting PCs as more than mere boxes looking just like the next guy’s. HP redesigned its machines, infusing them with a slew of features, such as one that lets customers play a DVD or listen to music without booting up the entire machine.
Read more.
Tags: Hewlett Packard|
Posted By: Ashkan Karbasfrooshan | Jan 4th
Subscribe: