Following 15 years at Sun Microsystems and the sudden layoff that ended my work for a company that I fully expected to stay with until I reached retirement age, as described in my Working Life Part IV, I faced the challenge of making a living in Silicon Valley. Luckily, I had developed a network.

Freelancing

My first few months after leaving Sun with a small but welcome severance package were spent looking for freelance speech writing jobs. I was fortunate to have kept in touch with a colleague from my Sun days, who had been a speech writing mentor. Joel Postman had left before the layoffs took effect to work in executive communications at Hewlett-Packard. He helped me pitch for a freelance opportunity to write speeches for Nora Denzel, who headed a software division at the company. I met with her several times and wrote two presentations. By the end of 2004, I had been brought into the company as a full-time employee.

Blogging

Coincident with joining HP as a freelancer, I started kicking around the idea of this website and blog to build my portfolio and reputation as a freelancer. I took an entire year, but in January 2006, I posted my first blog entry. I’d developed my WordPress skills with Joel, who also promoted himself online. Something he and I, in our different ways, have continued to this day.

The HP Way

I joined a behemoth of a company with over 300,000 employees worldwide formed by the merger of HP and Compaq back in 2001 (and described at the time by my old boss Scott McNealy as the “slow motion collision of two garbage trucks.“)

However, working in the comms division in the HQ building was a smart team that brought professionalism to their daily work. I enjoyed writing content for Nora, who presented with pizzaz and appreciated my work. We traveled to HP facilities in Europe, including the labs outside Bristol, where I’d last lived in 1979. The city streets were familiar. Later that same trip, I booked a presentation at the Telco World Congress conference in Barcelona in January 2005. Nora had to return to California for meetings and then back across the Atlantic for this event. Unfortunately, it was the Friday before the formal event opening that weekend, and a mere 20 people were in the audience.

It was on that trip that we were sitting at breakfast in a hotel when Nora glanced at a message on her phone, gasped, and handed it to me. The HP Board had just forced CEO Carly Fiorina out.

Fiorina had riled many of the old guard at HP, who still clung to the “HP Way” created by the company founders back in the 1950s.

Shortly after, Nora’s responsibilities changed, and I was reassigned to support the head of HR, Chilean-born Marcela Perez de Alonso. I only supported her for a few months. However, my one contribution was her presentation at an Organizational Development conference in San Francisco, where I took the initiative to record the presentation and have it transcribed. Bizarrely, this is still available on the HP website.

HP Labs

After my brief stint supporting HR, I was asked to move into the storied HP Labs and support the newly appointed Prith Banerjee. He had spent many years in academia and was well-respected by the Labs 500 engineers in seven worldwide locations. However, he had to fall in line with the new CEO’s cost-cutting initiatives and canceled some “fringe” projects. Nevertheless, there were plenty of fascinating research topics to write about. I attended a ‘poster session’ at an HP Labs gathering in Boston where I asked researchers to describe their project so their grandmother or young child could understand the technology. There was work on the environmental impact of data centers, insights into the future, and an opportunity to meet retired employees who had been there in the early days.

HP Labs occupied the building where founders Bill Hewett and Dave Packard had their adjoining offices, kept as a shrine to their vision and innovation. Prominently displayed on the 60s-era desk was the icon HP pocket calculator. (Between the two offices was the private washroom they shared!)

MagCloud

One of the unexpected benefits of my association with the Labs was an early introduction to the MagCloud print-on-demand service for magazines. Engineers Udi Chatow and Andrew Bolwell explained the ease with which anyone with a PDF document could produce excellent quality ‘evergreen’ magazines. At the time I was the president of the Northern California Chapter of the National Speakers Association and convinced the members of the value of own high-quality magazine. Six editions of SPEAKER magazine resulted. Later, I helped Kombucha Brewers International produce SYMBIOSIS. Editions of both remain online and available as PDF downloads or printed magazines.

Mark Hurd

In March 2005, Mark Hurd was recruited from NCR and appointed CEO. His tenure was, to say the least, interesting.

He started out focused on ROI across the company, and cost-cutting measures were implemented. Wall Street was delighted. Wikipedia:

Under Hurd’s tenure, the company met Wall Street expectations in 21 out of 22 quarters and increased profits for 22 straight quarters, while its revenue rose 63% and stock price doubled. He laid off 15,200 workers  — 10% of the workforce — shortly after becoming CEO. Other cost-cutting included reducing the IT department from 19,000 to 8,000, reducing the number of software applications that HP used from 6,000 to 1,500, and consolidating HP’s 85 data centers to 6. During the 2009 recession, depending on job role Hurd imposed a temporary 5%, 10% or 15% pay cut on all employees and removed many benefits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hurd

Despite his successful stewardship of the company finances, Hurd was — like Fiorina before him — forced out by the board over a dubious HR issue in August 2010. He went on to a successful career at Oracle and sadly passed away in 2019, aged 62.

Pretexting scandal

“A fish rots from the head.” (Turkish proverb)

For a company founded in a garage listed as “the birthplace of Silicon Valley,” the period I worked there was not a happy one. This was not the fault of the many dedicated employees, but more the actions of leaders, especially the Board of Directors. Wikipedia again:

On September 5, 2006, Newsweek revealed that the general counsel of Hewlett-Packard, at the behest of HP chairwoman Patricia Dunn, had contracted a team of independent security experts to investigate board members and several journalists in order to identify the source of an information leak. In turn, those security experts recruited private investigators who used a spying technique known as pretexting. The pretexting involved investigators impersonating HP board members and nine journalists (including reporters for CNET, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal) in order to obtain their phone records. The information leaked related to HP’s long-term strategy and was published as part of a CNET article in January 2006.

Patricia Dunn claimed she did not know beforehand the methods the investigators used to try to determine the source of the leak. Board member George Keyworth was ultimately accused of being the source and on September 12, 2006, he resigned, although he continued to deny making unauthorized disclosures of confidential information to journalists and was thanked by Mark Hurd for his board service. It was also announced at that time that Dunn would continue as chairwoman until January 18, 2007, at which point HP CEO Mark Hurd would succeed her. Then, on September 22, 2006 HP announced that Dunn had resigned as chairwoman because of the “distraction her presence on our board” created. On September 28, 2006, Ann Baskins, HP’s general counsel, resigned hours before she was to appear as a witness before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, where she would ultimately invoke the Fifth Amendment to refuse to answer questions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_spying_scandal

I witnessed the challenge the scandal posed to my colleagues in the Corporate Comms department.

Soon enough, however, the restructuring in the company came to the team I was part of. A new head of Marketing followed the CEO’s directive to cut costs, and in August 2008, just under four years after joining the company, I was one of a large group he dismissed.

It was back to the freelance life.