Winds of change blow through HP's closets
July 28, 2015
It's time to check back in with Hewlett-Packard, the vendor providing enterprise servers and solutions for a meaningful section of the 3000 migrators. Our latest news update involves poaching employees and a nouveau dress code, a subset of the things that any splitting-up corporation might be handling.
Details of the HP split into HP Enterprise and HP Inc were rolled out earlier this month, and there's explicit language on how the workforce will be handled once it is halved. Each of the new entities has a one-year embargo on even approaching the other's employees for hiring. For the six months beginning in November of 2015 -- a period when a lot of serious hiring gets delayed -- the two companies cannot hire from the other's ranks. If an employee is fired by Enterprise or Inc, then it's open season.
To sum up, if a talented HP staffer wants to work at the other HP before next June, getting fired is the fastest way to get permission. That might turn out to matter more than it appears, since the company just floated a memo in the Enterprise Services group, including HP-UX and Proliant operations, about professional dress, according a report from the website The Register.
Men should avoid turning up to the office in T-shirts with no collars, faded or torn jeans, shorts, baseball caps and other headwear, sportswear, and sandals and other open shoes. Women are advised not to wear short skirts, faded or torn jeans, low-cut dresses, sandals, crazy high heels, and too much jewelry.
It wouldn't be unprecedented. When former CEO Carly Fiorina took her first tour of former Compaq facilities, post-merger, employees there were told to don "western wear" as a welcoming gesture.
That was at least a merger. Nothing the size of Hewlett-Packard has ever tried to cleave itself into two complementary pieces remaining in the same business sector. This is uncharted territory, but a dress code memo and limited job transfer options might deliver some new talent into the non-HP workforce. Meanwhile, the current CEO says that turning around the company has been relatively easy.
CEO Meg Whitman, who'll lead Enterprise, said latest chapter of her turnaround of the company is easier than running for California governor. On a Bloomberg TV show, Whitman said running her political campaign that lost the election was harder than a turnaround.
You know, you get up every morning, and you fight the good fight, and you win hearts and minds of HP people, and you restore the confidence of customers and partners. So it’s been hard but it’s been really gratifying. And I have to say, relative to running for governor, this is easy.
The nuances and operational detail of creating two $60 billion entities — which will partner to buy supplies, to jointly sell products to customers, and to share patents and other intellectual property — might start to tax Whitman's estimation. Intellectual property at HP is held in the HP Development Company. The MPE/iX licensing is probably going to remain with Enterprise. If there were any technical resources in the 3000 community that want to take on that license, HP may be up for cleaning out its Enterprise closets.
Sorry, just kidding. Nobody wants those engineers to stop wearing t-shirts, either, do they? It's an exercise for the reader to decide which proposition seems sillier in this season of change at HP.