Foreword

Mr. Test and Measurement--Bill Terry

HP legend has it that somewhere in the 1955 period that Bill and Dave realized that HP faced a crucially important management gap. The 10-years of post-war growth of the company was real and formidable, but built with the management team of men who had come out of the WWII era; Dave, who ran the fledgling HP during the war, Bill, who served in the Army Signal Corps, Al Bagley, a B-29 pilot, Bruce Wholey, an engineer at the MIT Radiation Lab, Barney Oliver, a brilliant physicist at Bell Labs, Noel Eldred, engineer at a Bay Area manufacturer. Noel Porter, one of Bill and Dave's classmates at Stanford was in another Bay Area company doing WWII production. And there were others.

Recall that it was the stunning rampup of our nation's manufacturing from a depression decade of the 1930s which won the war. From steel to oil to food, this nation went on a coordinated building program which dazzled the world with its efficiency and productivity. In a real sense, it was the intricate balancing of all that production capacity which assigned natural resources to the most crucial needs as the war years progressed.

Out of the newly built Pentagon, came a war production team called the "Whiz Kids." Robert McNamara had come from Ford to lead a new team to exploit whole new theories in modern defense strategy, using new economic analysis, operations research, game theory, computing, and such. As the war ended, such successes moved fairly quickly into the country's business schools. And thus the batches of new MBAs were entering the mid-1950s with these new skills.

This all led to HP going on a recruiting drive to hire a new cadre of future managers, which was undertaken in addition to the regular recruiting of engineers. It was a remarkable initiative, and soon resulted in a cohort of new hires with names that every HP employee recognizes, John Young, Dean Morton, Tom Perkins, Frank Wesniak, Dan O'Rourke, Peter Sherrill, and on and on.

We came to call it the HP Class of '58, and it came to include others without MBA's from Stanford or Harvard, like Bill Terry and myself. This HPMemoir is the story of Bill, told in an Oral History format, and honestly, for me it was just like sitting in on the personal interviews done by HP's PR manager Dave Kirby.

Bill and I joined HP within 6 months of each other, and I have always considered him a good friend, although he progressed much higher in management. Bill had an emphatic (I struggled with the right term, others might be assertive, forceful, acerbic) personality, although he also was friendly to his teams. A lot of his early career was devoted to running the oscilloscope programs in the company, and with the continuing times that HP regularly got beat up by Tektronix, it was no wonder that those HP managers sort of grew strong and resilient personalities.

Bill and I, without MBAs, never quite fit the academic manager mold of those like John Young or Dean Morton or Tom Perkins. He, as almost all newly-hired engineers of the time, spent about 6 months in the Mahurin Service Dept "Charm School," working on instrument repair, answering customer complaints, and then spending several months out on the actual production lines.

Bill was intricately involved in the enterprise-changing decision of 1960, to buy out all the 13 independent Sales Representatives, and his interview offers wonderful insights to those negotiations. On one hand it was a pure business matter because HP had been buying up other test and measurement manufacturers who used the same Reps. Companies like Boonton Radio, F.L. Moseley, Harrison Labs, and such. On the other hand, it was a deeply personal matter because those same Reps put HP into the business with their customer expertise.

I told my story elsewhere, about my questioning Bill Hewlett at some off-site dinner reception. Before HP decided to buy the Reps, Tektronix had embarked on their own program to take over their national sales with Tek company management. They simply "fired" their reps, many of whom were the same reps we had, with no negotiation for assets or "goodwill." In the banter before the dinner, I asked Bill if HP had considered the same process, saving maybe 15+ million dollars? I then got taught a serious Bill and Dave philosophy, "Goddammit, Minck, these are personal friends, we would NEVER decide to just let them go!" I should have known better than to even ask the question.

After spending some years running the Colorado Springs scope operations, Bill returned to the Bay Area, and spent several years in the HP computer operations. After that he was promoted to VP, to take over the Test and Measurement operation, and grew it very successfully, for more than a decade, retiring from that position in the 90's.

One of Bill's best manager traits was his little Terry-grams, personal notes he sent to people whose work had come to his attention. He was an avid reader of industry publications, so any lab engineer who succeeded in publishing a technical article in a trade magazine would get a personal note from Bill, "Nice Job," Bill Terry. It was precisely that personal attention that made him a respected leader, giving well-received attention for the troops down in the trenches.

This is a long story, 208 pages, but it reads easily, and you find yourself imagining that you are there with Bill in those early days. But I'll advise you to leave your editing pencil on the desk, the interview-transcribing secretary back in 1995 didn't get some names spelled right and occasionally a phrase won't read right. But it was a long time ago, and with my fading memory, if I undertook to correct name spellings, I would make as many new mistakes as I corrected.

What you will understand is the personal relationships that underpin this massive enterprise, growing fast, hiring, training, inventing, building, selling, and making dramatic measurement contributions which enabled our world's technology empire, from putting men on the moon to biotechnical and medical breakthroughs that benefited humanity.

The other realization that struck me from Bill's inside-upper-management position is the continuing complexity that HP's Vice-Presidential levels went through in trying to get the Sales Forces structured right. From our customer's viewpoint, products from computers and software applications and systems and test and measurement divisions all got presented by a confusing array of sales people. More than once the reporting structures were realigned, causing chaos in our field ranks, fights over commissions, etc. Other organizational moves from John Young's/ McKinsey recommendations resulted in "Matrix Management," everyone had TWO bosses. Guess how that worked out? These were top minds trying to solve technology and business issues, from the customer's angle, and reading through it merely convinces you that they earned their salaries in those times.

And finally, Bill told me this story about Barney Oliver, when asked why he spent most of his employment with one company. "It was a chance to accomplish great things with your friends." I think that just about says it all.

John Minck

HP Memories

This memory of Bill Terry's career at hp results from the work of the www.hpmemoryproject.org website of Marc Mislanghe, who with John Minck edited and published the original archive of Memoirs. After Marc's untimely death in 2014, Ken Kuhn has now assumed the custodianship with John, and together they will continue to expand the Memoirs section.

One of the main objectives in starting this website in 2011 was (and still is today) to get in touch with people who have worked at hp from the birth of the company up to today. We are interested in hearing your memories no matter what division or country you worked in, or whether you were in engineering, marketing, finance, administration, or worked in a factory. This is because all of you have contributed to the story of this unique and successful enterprise.

Your memories are treasure for this website. While product and technology are our main concern, other writings related to the company life are highly welcome, as far as they stay inside the hp Way guidelines.

Anybody Else? Please get in touch by emailing the webmaster on the Contact US link at http://www.hpmemoryproject.org