Fortune asks can HP win doing it the Hurd way? Yes, it is a funny play on words, but more importantly it is a question that pits Hurd vs. Fiorina in a battle of opposite management styles.
Fiorina owned Davos, the annual teach-in for plutocrats in the Swiss Alps; Hurd skipped this year's session, citing "customer commitments." Fiorina was always on message; Hurd is sales optimization in a suit.
Indeed, from the avuncular way he lets his rimless glasses perch at the end of his nose to his straight-talk emphasis on fundamentals, Hurd evokes another tech industry turnaround maestro, Lou Gerstner, the former IBM (Research) boss who famously said, "The last thing IBM needs right now is a vision."
Like Gerstner, Hurd is reviving a sales culture that had waned over the years. During the Fiorina era, HP had engineering prowess and marketing razzle-dazzle, yes. But legions of crafty sales mercenaries? Not so much.
Hurd appears to be a nuts and bolts guy. Do people want vision? Yes. But companies often stop with the vision and don't focus on the hard work it takes to implement it.
As an avid college basketball fan, I see this all the time. Guys that are 6'9" and average 25 points a game in high school have NBA dreams, but they don't work hard. They expect to make it on natural talent and a little bit of practice. They don't realize that at the next level, the competition is that much better.
The great ones are always practicing, in any area of expertise. It's the boring hard work that gives the opportunity to be great in the first place. It sounds like HP is on the right track, but we'll check in down the road and see.
Funny you bring that up. I remember the first time I ever met someone that I had read about in the press, and she wasn’t anything like I thought.
Since then I’ve met several people that I read about previously, and it just confirmed my belief that most magazines (and books too) present only one small side of a person’s character. It might be a magnification of the Fundamental Attribution Error.
And since I’ve been written about several times over the last few years in local periodicals, I’m always surprised at the way I am portrayed. It’s usually good, but almost always simple.
One problem with the business press is the piling-on effect: when Fiorina was first at HP, I remember nothing but glowing portraits of her. Then, when the problems surfaced, it was nothing but how awful she was.
Another problem is the inability to raise questions that should be obvious. I’ve seen several articles about Hurd’s decision to give the business units control of their own sales forces (which is probably the right decision). Every one of these articles also mentions “giving important customers a single point of contact”? How precisely are these two things made to exist in the same world? Inquiring minds would like to know…I would guess it’s done by having an overlay national accounts organization of some kind–my point is that anyone with any familiarity with sales force organization should have thought to raise the question.