Latest / The Innovation Show / Chuck House The Odyssey of an Intrapreneur Permission Denied

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Chuck House The Odyssey of an Intrapreneur Permission Denied · The Innovation Show

• 0:00
  Before we start, I want to thank.
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  You, the listener to the innovation show.
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  One of the biggest influences on my career and this show was Charles Handy, the late
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  Charles Handy, who was a winner of The Thinkers 50 Lifetime Achievement Award.
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  I was awarded that award the other day for the Innovation from the Thinkers 50.
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  There's the award that they gave me and I join Charles Handy, which is just
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  incredible to me, and I want to thank you, the listener of the show and the
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  people who've been on the show, the people on those shelves behind me.
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  Who've been part of this show for a very, very long time.
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  Thank you so much for all your support and thanks to Thinkers
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  50 for recognizing the innovation show First ever podcast recognized.
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  So thank you to everybody who's always listened to the show.
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  can find our friends Kyndryl at K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L Kyndryl.com.
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  How to gain your boss's support for crazy out of the box ideas that could
• 1:17
  change the world seems relevant to a question about American or any innovation.
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  Little is written from this bottom up view about how to garner support if
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  you're an intrapreneur, or importantly, how to grant it if you are a manager.
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  The good news is that there are rules, discoverable, learnable,
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  applicable, effective, and actionable rules that can be adopted.
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  These are described via several frustrating case studies where
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  our guest first learned them.
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  He calls them the Intrapreneur Rule Book and Intrapreneuring Manager's Playbook.
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  The Rule Book and the playbook evolved from repeated intrapreneurial
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  experiences, plus a decade of codifying and teaching managerial and leadership
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  practices to embed these concepts in a major international corporation.
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  By the way, it's a few decades 'cause he wrote this a while back.
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  We are incredibly honored to have him with us for a firsthand account from the man
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  responsible for so many entrepreneurial pursuits that he earned The one and
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  only Medal of Defiance from Hewlett Parker, founder David Parker, which reads
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  Medal of Defiance awarded in recognition of extraordinary contempt and defiance
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  beyond The normal call of engineering duty,
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  it is an honor to welcome the Medal of Defiance winner, serial
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  intrapreneur and author of this Beauty Permission denied Charles Chuck House.
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  Welcome to the show.
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  Well, thank you.
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  Thank you.
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  It's a brilliant book, Chuck.
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  As I said to you all air that Mark Twain quote, history doesn't
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  repeat, but it rhymes is so true.
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  And when I read your story and I shared excerpts to people I know
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  who are doing similar work to you that you were doing back in the 1960
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  seventies and they're like going, oh my God, that could be talking about me.
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  Maybe we will share just a little bit of context 'cause you've seen it
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  now from the outside, but this was written almost from an inside view,
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  how these problems don't go away.
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  Well, first of all, that does chronicle times that were 50, 60, 70 years,
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  almost certainly a lifetime ago.
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  And you have to wonder, is that contemporary got any value today?
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  And the answer is I've seen it throughout my entire life.
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  I'm running a startup at the moment, and my partner is a classic entrepreneur.
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  He's maddening.
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  It is hard to work with him and his ideas are brilliant
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  and his skills are impeccable.
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  He never could get a hearing by his bosses.
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  And he wound up, actually, we went out on the side, and I have to tell you, it's fun
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  to work with him and rereading the book.
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  It's like, oh my God, this is what I should be doing today with him.
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  I have to tell you though, where the book came from because the issue
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  was along a fairly lengthy career, almost 30 years with Hewlett Packard.
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  Eventually after retirement, I decided to write the history of Hewlett Packard.
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  With another colleague, and we call it the HP.
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  Phenomenon.
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  it's published by Stanford Press.
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  It's a classic business book.
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  up at the time was Stanford's third bestselling business book ever.
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  That's not a real high bar compared to Harvard Business School.
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  But anyway, it was a well received book except in my home division
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  of HP in Colorado Springs.
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  And two ex general managers called me, and each said, how
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  come you didn't have our division?
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  Front and center.
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  I said, well, it's really simple.
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  We were trying to tell a positive story about Hewlett Packard and
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  our division was always the doormat we were up against Techtronics.
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  We got beat on every turn.
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  And they said, well, you beat 'em a couple times yourself, with your
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  display program and your logic program.
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  don't you write another book that focuses only on that part of our shared career?
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  So I wrote this actually in response to two general managers saying, my
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  God, you know, you ought to tell our story because it's very different
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  than the Hewlett Packard story.
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  it's brilliant, man, and, I loved it.
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  And actually I compared it.
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  I have the HP phenomenon, I have the HP way, which was written by the founders.
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  And I compared what they said versus actually what happened in the
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  halls, like what happened to you.
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  And I thought I'd start off with a little statement here just to
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  give people a feel here and just.
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  You can do a control f, replace and replace Chuck
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  here with yourself in any way.
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  So Chuck says here, and it's such a , sad, but common statement, serial innovators,
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  can both exist as intrapreneurs pioneering new ideas and companies.
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  And as intrapreneurs growing and reinvigorating corporations, if permission
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  is denied consistently and pervasively denied by managers and erstwhile
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  leaders, intrapreneurs have few options.
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  One is to become a contrarian defiantly fighting the system.
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  A second is to leave finding a smaller receptive company
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  or becoming an entrepreneur.
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  Entrepreneur like your colleague Now, Chuck.
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  And the third, sadly by far the most common is to scale back your expectations,
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  lower your creative quotient, and give in.
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  And as I said, in a post recently on LinkedIn, the great Dee hock
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  who was the founder of Visa, was on the show many times.
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  And he said, some people just retire on the job.
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  And one person described this to you that they check their brain at the door.
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  This was a lady who said, when her startup was acquired by IBM.
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  This is what she did.
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  Let's talk about that because that is everywhere I.
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  So that woman, actually I had never met her but she is the daughter-in-law
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  of the gal who co-founded software Publishing Corporation coming out of
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  Hewlett Packard, which was significant.
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  It never has gotten press for it, but it was the first almost
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  all female led startup in Silicon Valley in the seventies.
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  So this woman's son like 25 years later.
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  So we were there talking about the HP book and having a good time.
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  She said, you ought to meet my daughter-in-law.
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  And this vivacious gal bounces through the door.
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  And I, well, where are you at?
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  Well, I was at this little startup, and what we did was, and da da da da da,
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  you know, and I mean, just bubbling.
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  And then I said, what are you doing now?
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  She said, well, IBM bought us about six months ago.
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  And I said, how's that going?
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  And she said.
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  You know, she said, I show up for work, and they asked me to check my brain at the
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  door, and I thought, what a great line.
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  The only thing she wouldn't let me do is use her name in the book.
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  Understandable.
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  you experienced that.
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  Saw it with so many great colleagues over the years.
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  Oh yeah.
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  that's unfortunately the name of the game.
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  And the great service that Gifford Pinchot did when he wrote his
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  book about entrepreneuring was he gave voice to a lot of people.
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  You know, he is got Art Fry with 3M doing, you know, he made a glue that
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  didn't stick, that became Postit notes.
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  The guy that did the Pontiac Fiero, the guy that did the Mustang for Ford.
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  All of these were crazy cockamamie ideas and, most people in management
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  rules just hate to have uncertainty.
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  they'd rather have a small win that's guaranteed than a
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  large win that's speculative.
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  so I just, you know, that's not been my life.
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  And so I wanted to give voice to, to at least my perspective.
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  and you do it so many times and you kept consistently doing
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  it, which was interesting.
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  You didn't give up.
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  And there's a line here that I thought was really important.
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  You said, as companies become more successful, paradox lead
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  the capacity to make investments for the day after tomorrow grows.
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  But the will and courage to implement an innovation strategy.
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  Evaporates, and you told me off air.
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  The significance of this today is that AI and machine learning are the
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  new paradigm and innovation teams everywhere have to deal with this,
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  along with most importantly their bosses who might not agree about
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  the imperative of these things.
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  Maybe you'll elaborate on that.
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  Well, you know, I mean, that could open chapters.
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  but AI is a good example.
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  We had a dinner party last weekend.
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  And we had what do we have eight people eight professionals,
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  four men and four women.
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  and I have to tell you that of the eight absolutely convinced
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  that AI is killing the world.
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  their own jobs are affected badly.
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  They've had sons and daughters lose their jobs because AI has displaced them.
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  they could cite chapter and verse the problems that AI gets wrong.
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  As can my wife and I, and, after they left, Jenny said, let me tell
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  you the opportunities I'm seeing right now that we've never been
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  able to do that I can do with with OpenAI, or I can do with chat GPT.
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  And she starts outlining like three new companies just right off the bat.
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  And you go, now how come you didn't say that last night?
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  She said the climate wasn't right.
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  They weren't in a receptive mood to listen.
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  And I think, in a small way that reflects exactly how management's
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  thinking about it around the loop.
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  The other one you the given credit is one of the founders of the internet.
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  I was talking with him one day, he said, well, one thing I did, he said, I
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  asked Gemini if it could do my obituary.
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  He said, and I figured I would know most of the points that it brought up.
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  He said, it writes this flowery thing.
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  And he said, God, I was a paragon of virtue.
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  But he said, you can't believe how many things I did that I've never heard of.
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  Yeah, that's so true.
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  So, you know, there's both sides of the coin.
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  it doesn't matter whether, we were going from communication to
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  switching circuits in the sixties.
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  from hardware to software in the eighties.
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  from raw data to databases and, data banks and big data in the two thousands.
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  And we're going to machine language and AI today.
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  and every one of those steps is threatening to the old guard and, seething
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  with opportunity for the kids that see it.
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  if you haven't heard the phrase, well, we didn't used do it that way, Park that one!
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  It's an important thing, and I'm jumping ahead here, but one of
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  the things you talk about was.
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  you were a history scholar and you had the occasion to meet Thomas Kuhn
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  and ironically, I was laughing at the fact that Kon didn't really want to
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  be challenged by you when you met him, but the whole idea of Thomas Kuhn and
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  the idea of a paradigm shift, and one of the things you call out was the
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  shift from vacuum tubes to transistors.
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  And the resistance of that for many, many colleagues and colleagues
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  who thought maybe a night school course was enough to be able to
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  upskill to move with that shift.
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  But as a result, you saw so many people lose their jobs.
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  I'd love you to share that because these are some of the echoes that
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  you see, or the rhymes that Mark Twain talked about that you see from
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  generational shift to generational shift.
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  When these new technologies come in, some people just
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  resist them and get left behind.
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  And then some people, as you say embrace them and catapult themselves forward.
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  so the story of the way I kind of experienced it was I was a sophomore in
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  college and wound up married and had a child on the way and had to have a job.
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  the issue, of course our school required full-time enrollment.
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  So what are you gonna do?
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  Well, I figured out two things.
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  One is I could work afternoons and evenings and I could go to school
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  in the morning, but, but most of my classes, half my classes were in the
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  morning, half or in the afternoon.
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  At the time, nobody had computerized him.
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  I could double enroll.
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  so I enrolled for two classes at eight o'clock, two at nine o'clock, two at 10
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  o'clock, and then I'm free by 11, right?
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  then I had to find somebody who knew the assignment so I could, stay
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  current in the course I didn't go to.
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  so that's all going on.
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  Well, the job I got was working in aerospace in Southern
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  California as a draftsman.
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  And they were just into the silicon structures, , diodes and
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  transistors and and all of their old designers were vacuum tube guys.
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  And these guys were explaining to me that the problem with transistors
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  was they'd have electrons that amplify, but they have holes.
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  And what does it mean to have a hole in your device?
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  Vacuum tube never had a hole in the device.
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  And so they would explain to me patiently that this stuff can't work.
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  And of course, it worked fine and I didn't know any different,
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  well, the sequel is when I graduated, I went to Hewlett
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  Packard to work on instrumentation.
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  I was the first person to build a solid state circuit for 'em.
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  Everybody there was still doing vacuum tubes.
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  It just, two years later a hundred percent of the, I was the 98th engineer.
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  I was the first one to use silicon devices.
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  And you go, wow.
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  Well, you know, you could replicate that story.
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  Today, I just finished a story about COVID, actually Ireland was one of
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  the subject areas because there are some fairly interesting stories there.
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  The uk even more so because the people that were dying early were
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  dying in much greater race than the government ever told anyone.
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  Well, you can map the data that they were supplying and just do a convolution
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  integral shift for conformal mapping of when the deaths occurred compared to when
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  the admission to the hospital occurred and demonstrate these radically fatal numbers.
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  And no one in the entire medical industry, anywhere, I found around
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  the world understood conformal mapping or convolution integrals.
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  And you go, this is trivial mathematics, and it's just graphical interpretation.
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  and that I did that first for an emphysema study in the sixties and 60 years later,
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  that technique is unknown, basically.
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  So we're currently trying to teach it to the world Health Organization.
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  that emphysema story was an important experience for you because it gave
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  you a different type of education.
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  And here you wrote, "who among us doesn't appreciate that, personalities
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  and prejudice, not to mention different skills and perspectives, often override
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  fact of objectivity and reasoning.
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  Engineers and scientists too, ignore this at their peril.
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  Human nature intrudes and usually, in fact, prevails.
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  So you were writing about the emphysema project and you were brought in, and it's
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  a really important, I saw this as a really important lens through which to read the
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  entire book because it planted a seed for the entire story as a backbone for the
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  book's larger arc, that how do you prove a system that prefers ritual over results?
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  I thought that was, you wrote that, how do you move a system
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  that prefers rituals over results?
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  and you saw this first there and then saw also how diverse groups can work
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  well together if they're harnessed, but also terribly if they're not harnessed.
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  I think Martin Luther wrote all that on the, didn't he?
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  But let's tell our audience about this.
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  So what I thought we would do is tell our audience about the emphysema
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  project you were working on, some of the lessons you learned from that.
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  Then we'll move to the history of your intrapreneurship, really
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  inside hp, the ups and downs, many downs as well that you had.
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  But we'll tell about that.
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  And then on part two, we'd move towards more towards that real book
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  and the managerial real book that you do towards the end of the book.
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  So I'd love you to tell us a little bit about this project
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  and what you learned from it.
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  First.
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  Well, let me describe the situation.
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  So I'm an engineer at Hewlett Packard where, you know, happily
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  droning along, if you will, doing some fairly interesting things.
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  and I'm like, I don't know, 29 years old.
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  And I enrolled in some classes at the local college to do some graduate work,
• 18:44
  it was on a hillside and I'm late for class and I'm running up the hill from
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  the parking lot and I'm out of breath.
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  And I'd been a mountain climber for years, and it's like, well, what the hell?
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  how come I'm having trouble breathing Went to the doctor and
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  he pronounced that I had emphysema, which I'd never heard of at the time.
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  And it was a fairly new disease being talked about.
• 19:08
  went to the library and looked it up and it had some interesting, first thing it
• 19:12
  said is, there's no cure and there's no treatment, and you'll be dead in 20 years.
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  And I'm thinking, well, now wait a minute.
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  I've got three kids at home and another one on the way this I
• 19:21
  wanna hang around, you know?
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  and in the Denver Post, I lived in Colorado Springs
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  about 70 miles from Denver.
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  And the Denver Post came out with a story that the new Air, clean Air Act
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  of 1970 was establishing commissions to study air pollution for America.
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  And I said to my wife, I wanna be on that commission.
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  The first question is, how do you get on one?
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  So I interviewed my boss at HP and he said, I know a guy who knows the governor,
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  and the net was I did like 20 mailings and got like 12 interviews with people.
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  And all of a sudden the phone rings one day and says I understand
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  you're an air pollution expert.
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  Well, sure, would you like to be on our commission?
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  Boom.
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  I'm on the commission.
• 20:09
  Right.
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  So, what I knew about air pollution was one class at Caltech, you know 15
• 20:15
  years earlier or maybe 10 years earlier.
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  It was, you know, nothing.
• 20:19
  In other words, I get up to this commission and the question
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  is, what are we supposed to do?
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  And the chairman is saying, well, we are the second worst state in
• 20:29
  America for emphysema death rate.
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  Wow.
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  Okay.
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  That's, that's why I'm here.
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  I want to fix that.
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  What causes it?
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  Well, it's either big cities or it's smoking I'd never smoked
• 20:42
  and I'm not living in a big city.
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  and he has a map then of the top 10 states in America with the
• 20:48
  worst 10 for emphysema death rate.
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  Not one of them has a big city.
• 20:54
  And I was, and my wife at the time was a Mormon, and Utah
• 20:58
  was the 15th state out of 51.
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  Five out of five.
• 21:01
  Oh.
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  and I know they don't even allow cigarettes in the state, you know,
• 21:06
  and I'm thinking, so smoking can't be theirs and it can't be these big cities.
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  'cause that's not where everybody's dying, you know, Montana and
• 21:13
  Idaho and Maine and, come on.
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  so I said, could I study the data?
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  And they gave me data for, I don't know, 2,700 deaths over the last two
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  decades from the Department of Health.
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  And the question is, what do you do with that data?
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  You know, big computer printout, sheets, you know, the old Z fold paper.
• 21:32
  Well, it turned out HP that year had brought out a desktop calculator.
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  Essentially the first pc a decade before we really knew about PCs.
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  And I had one at home and I had a, I had a modem connection and I
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  could take a statistics course 130 miles away, the first course of
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  that type in America, by the way.
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  I do all that and I put together these studies and all of a sudden it leaps
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  off the page that where people are dying or not in the cities, they're dying in
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  the country and they're dying in little air basins that had trapped toxic air.
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  And, and you go, well that's, and so then I try to convince my fellows on
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  this committee, and they're mostly pulmonary experts and, and they
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  thought I was just completely crazy.
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  Well, it turned out we uncovered the first understanding of submicron
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  particulate matter killing people.
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  And today, emphysema is the third biggest killer in the
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  world from exactly that cause.
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  I never got credit for that.
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  But you know, it took 25 years before a scholarly paper nailed the same thing.
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  And, today it's common wisdom.
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  that's the point.
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  That's why I'm, thank you for humoring me and telling the story.
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  I think it's so important.
• 22:53
  So many intrapreneurs, like, you don't get the credit.
• 22:56
  You know, there's a famous, I'm gonna show it on the screen, I'm gonna jump ahead.
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  There's a famous Electronics Magazine article I'm showing it on
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  the screen there for our audience.
• 23:05
  you were celebrated and this actually led to great heights for you in your career.
• 23:10
  But the other gentleman on it BJ Moore, you tell us about him.
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  He was also given an award, but he had nothing to do with the project.
• 23:19
  He was just the suit behind the project as well.
• 23:22
  And I share that firstly, to give a chance to show this on screen
• 23:26
  and celebrate what you achieved.
• 23:28
  But secondly, that so many intrapreneurs don't get the chance to ever get the
• 23:34
  credit for the work that they do.
• 23:35
  the way I often said is a great guy I had on the show before,
• 23:39
  Jeffrey J. Fox, he had this brilliant saying that, he said, you need to be
• 23:44
  a credit maker, not a credit taker.
• 23:45
  let's share that because it's a tough, I find that a tough one, Chuck,
• 23:49
  that I hated giving credit to these jackasses who are usually the people
• 23:54
  who are denying the project, and then you have to give them the credit.
• 23:59
  so let me, let me kind of, it is, it is adjacent, but it
• 24:02
  is, it bears on that story.
• 24:05
  So, so that emphysema work with Colorado was 1970 to 72.
• 24:10
  Okay.
• 24:11
  Fast forward to 2000 and eight.
• 24:16
  So what would that be?
• 24:17
  You know, 35, 38 years later.
• 24:20
  Okay.
• 24:20
  And I was hosting a project at Stanford.
• 24:23
  I was running an innovation group at Stanford at the time, and I
• 24:28
  found a project that was studying graphics around innovation.
• 24:34
  From a gal at Indiana University.
• 24:36
  I called her to say, and she had run this contest for NSF for six years.
• 24:41
  had 10 winners every year.
• 24:44
  I said, How many times has that exhibit been shown west of the Mississippi?
• 24:49
  She said, none, never.
• 24:51
  And I said, what would it take to show it here?
• 24:53
  She said, you have to pay the freight to ship the poster
• 24:56
  boards out, you know, done.
• 24:58
  So I ran this thing for six months at Stanford.
• 25:01
  Fantastic show.
• 25:03
  But one day one of my advisors said, I want you to come to
• 25:06
  breakfast and meet a guy.
• 25:07
  Okay, Well, he's just an important guy, back in Washington.
• 25:11
  So I go and his name is Warren Muir, MUIR.
• 25:17
  I, while over breakfast rolls and coffee at this guy's house.
• 25:20
  I say are you related to John Muir, the guy that did all the
• 25:26
  environmental stuff, Yosemite National Park and stuff like that?
• 25:29
  He said, well, actually yes, in a kind of an indirect way, you know?
• 25:34
  And so he goes down that, and then he says, why did you do this exhibit?
• 25:39
  I said, well, years ago, it's interesting, I got interested in emphysema and I
• 25:44
  found the reason for why all this works.
• 25:47
  He said, and he got stony face and he said, no, you didn't.
• 25:51
  What do you mean?
• 25:53
  Yes, I did.
• 25:54
  He said, what you find, you know, kind of accusatory, this guy's
• 25:57
  like 65 years old, balding and gray, you know, and do you mean?
• 26:01
  And so I told him what I found and he just, he looked stunned.
• 26:07
  And then he said, what year was this?
• 26:09
  And I said, 71 is when I first published.
• 26:12
  He said, in 74, I was a graduate student and I found the exact same thing.
• 26:19
  And I said, what'd you do with it?
• 26:21
  He said, they wouldn't let me publish.
• 26:24
  And I said, what do you do today?
• 26:26
  he was chairman of the Environmental Protection Agency for America
• 26:30
  when I'm talking with him, and he never got credit for it.
• 26:34
  And, it didn't trouble him.
• 26:37
  Just the two of us being in a room to have that discussion
• 26:40
  for me is the credit I love.
• 26:42
  Wow.
• 26:43
  Well, you're, you're a bigger man than me.
• 26:45
  'cause, some of the struggles you had that I know.
• 26:49
  I mean, you know when you have the person who's actually the person who's
• 26:54
  been the biggest blocker and then all of a sudden they're standing up
• 26:57
  there giving presentations as if they invented the thing that, that's the one.
• 27:01
  I'm sure you've had a few of them.
• 27:03
  I, the pulmonary expert on the commission, you know, fought me tooth
• 27:08
  and nail and I found something like 15 years later where he basically was
• 27:13
  claiming he had invented all this stuff.
• 27:16
  And you go, okay, well, whatever,
• 27:18
  Well, I, yeah.
• 27:19
  Anyway, man, we better keep moving.
• 27:21
  So let's jump into the FAA story and one that inadvertently landed onto your lap.
• 27:27
  Literally it wasn't your first choice.
• 27:29
  And I'll give you a bit of context here to set us up and tell us about this story.
• 27:33
  'cause this is really where the HP story starts in the book and at the
• 27:39
  time, this is important to know and, and please give us context here.
• 27:43
  Virtually all computers used punch cards or teletype interfaces to input programs.
• 27:48
  These are the old massive, big computers.
• 27:51
  The idea of an interactive screen that we're on today that we take for
• 27:55
  granted on computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones, that was completely unknown.
• 28:00
  There wasn't even any type of thing to do a barcode in a grocery store,
• 28:06
  let alone something as complicated as a screen like we have today.
• 28:09
  So that's where we'll pick up the story.
• 28:12
  Tell us about the list.
• 28:14
  your boss who liked you going, you can pick anything on this to list to work on,
• 28:18
  and it wasn't actually quite the truth.
• 28:21
  so think about, you know, imagine a tablet today in a PC tablet.
• 28:27
  Get rid of the screen and everything you hold there is
• 28:31
  what a computer was at the time.
• 28:33
  You had the keyboard and you had whatever the inners were.
• 28:37
  you might have one line printout or you might just have a teletype
• 28:41
  that you had to print it off on like a typewriter kind of thing.
• 28:44
  that was it.
• 28:45
  the notion of displays was pretty radical, but I didn't start there.
• 28:50
  I'd just been busy doing, a couple of projects I considered
• 28:53
  myself the fair-haired boy in the division or the group.
• 28:56
  But he clearly didn't have the same perspective.
• 29:01
  he sat me down.
• 29:02
  He said, okay, it's time to pick some new projects.
• 29:05
  Here's a list of all the projects we're thinking about.
• 29:08
  I don't know, it's 12 or 15 lists.
• 29:10
  I said, well, how about this one and this one?
• 29:12
  He said, oh, I've already given those to Chuck Gustafson.
• 29:16
  why would you show me a list that's already had some
• 29:18
  things taken off the list?
• 29:19
  And well that answer was pretty not forthcoming.
• 29:24
  the question was, okay, what else do you wanna do?
• 29:27
  And I'm looking at this thing and it said, FAA control tower display.
• 29:32
  And I said, well, what's that?
• 29:33
  I've, I don't know anything about that.
• 29:35
  Well, it's this request we got from the Aviation Administration that they'd
• 29:40
  like to have something for a control tower that would show planes you
• 29:44
  know, orbiting and, and you could use them for tracking making sure planes
• 29:50
  are safe at, at around the airports.
• 29:54
  Okay why don't you go talk to Milt Russell?
• 29:57
  He knows a little more about it and da da da.
• 29:59
  And it turned out the guy he referred me to had built these things for General
• 30:04
  Electric with five foot long tubes, and, big, these were huge things.
• 30:09
  And he said, I think I know a way to, to make that tube much shorter.
• 30:14
  It would look almost like a TV set if we did it.
• 30:18
  And I will, how, why would that matter?
• 30:20
  Well, they could, they could put letters on the, this is United
• 30:24
  Airlines 7 21 coming in, and here's, here's Delta, something else.
• 30:29
  And here's British Airways, da da, and oh, great.
• 30:32
  Let's try that.
• 30:33
  Well, it turned out his technique for making the tube short.
• 30:36
  You, you couldn't read the letters.
• 30:39
  So, you know, they defocused too badly.
• 30:41
  So basically it didn't work for the one application that we were
• 30:45
  asked to consider, I had built this box and you could see, you
• 30:51
  could show anything at a distance.
• 30:53
  So back then the oscilloscopes had a lot, like a five inch display
• 30:58
  tube, this was like a 12 inch.
• 31:00
  So in terms of scaling, it's huge.
• 31:03
  And people said, well, that'd be a long arm nearsighted engineer to
• 31:07
  see that, or, it'd be a fast TV set.
• 31:10
  You could watch Gandhi in three minutes there's no market for this kind of thing.
• 31:14
  Well, I went on a little market research trip and I found several people that
• 31:19
  thought it'd be pretty interesting, including one in Hollywood that said,
• 31:23
  we're thinking about how you might build movies with computer graphics.
• 31:29
  turns out their first movie which was in PR but hadn't made
• 31:34
  any real, progress, was Tron.
• 31:37
  Tron eventually became quite famous because of my box.
• 31:42
  we pursued this thing, we built it Dave Packard came out for a division review.
• 31:49
  . And and it wasn't important enough for me to show him.
• 31:55
  it was just, it was shown.
• 31:57
  And then the discussion happened after I was out of the room and
• 32:02
  he said something to the effect of how many is just gonna sell.
• 32:06
  The marketing director said like 31, and he said, well, when I come back,
• 32:10
  I don't wanna see it in the lab.
• 32:12
  I was told that the next day, and I said, well, does that
• 32:15
  mean we're supposed to stop?
• 32:17
  Or does that mean we're supposed to have it in production?
• 32:20
  and my boss was, well, of course it means we're supposed to stop.
• 32:24
  I said, well, my dad wants two of 'em, and that's 6% of the world market right there,
• 32:29
  And so we ought to build it.
• 32:31
  we only needed about 60,000 bucks to do it.
• 32:35
  And back then, that was a fair amount of change, but it still was not huge.
• 32:39
  he let us go and we built it.
• 32:41
  The next year it was out on the market.
• 32:44
  By the time Packard came for the annual visit, we had sold 40 more than the 31 for
• 32:50
  a worldwide sale, he blew a head gasket.
• 32:53
  the eyes said to kill this son of a bitch, you know, pounding the table.
• 32:57
  I said, no, sir. What you said was you didn't wanna see it in the lab.
• 33:01
  It's not, it's in production.
• 33:03
  it turned out that wasn't a very good answer.
• 33:07
  But it got you this, I'm gonna show on the screen what it got you.
• 33:10
  It got you the first and only ever Medal of Defiance award.
• 33:15
  So those people watching this on YouTube, that's what Chuck got as a result.
• 33:20
  So, yeah, the sequel to that story is he went away and we wound up
• 33:27
  selling 17,000 units or something.
• 33:30
  So it was really the first computer graphics display ever sold commercially
• 33:35
  by any computer manufacturer.
• 33:36
  We were head of IBM by four years.
• 33:39
  We were head of digital equipment by 11 years for introducing a graphics terminal,
• 33:43
  but our own company didn't want it.
• 33:45
  Customers forced us to put the two together as opposed
• 33:48
  to we sold it as an idea.
• 33:50
  So, again, one of those things of who's in love with something versus who isn't.
• 33:55
  so 15 years later I give an opportunity to become the corporate engineering
• 34:00
  director of the entire company.
• 34:03
  by then we had 91 divisions.
• 34:04
  We had I don't know, 42,000 people of whom like 15,000 or engineers.
• 34:11
  gonna run the engineering group.
• 34:13
  Okay.
• 34:14
  And my office is gonna be next door to David Packard in Palo
• 34:17
  Alto, and not in Colorado Springs.
• 34:20
  and I didn't know him really well.
• 34:22
  I mean, I knew him, and he knew me, but it wasn't like we had dinner
• 34:25
  very often together kind of thing.
• 34:28
  anyway for my going away party in Colorado Springs, I get
• 34:33
  that damn plaque awarded to me.
• 34:36
  Along with, one of those things when you turn 50, they give
• 34:39
  you a cane with a honker on it.
• 34:41
  just total, it was a total roast I thought it was a gag gift.
• 34:46
  I moved to Palo Alto.
• 34:48
  I have this office set up and I've got that plaque sitting on
• 34:51
  a bookshelf Gifford pin show came by and he says, what is that?
• 34:55
  And I told him, it's this stupid plaque.
• 34:58
  He said, where'd you get it?
• 34:59
  And I told him, he said, can I take a picture?
• 35:01
  He took a Polaroid picture about two weeks later, I threw the plaque away.
• 35:06
  about a year later, he shows up with somebody from corporate publications
• 35:12
  and they wanna do this book.
• 35:14
  And it's chapter one.
• 35:16
  And he said, here's the Polaroid shot.
• 35:18
  I said, that's the only example that, ever existed.
• 35:22
  I threw the son of a bitch away, and for years I still thought it was a gag gift.
• 35:27
  He put it in the book as though it was real, but I thought it was a gag gift.
• 35:31
  Well, it turns out some years after that, when Packard was doing
• 35:35
  his autobiography, he put it in, I don't know if you noticed that.
• 35:39
  it's in there.
• 35:39
  And he says something like, what do you do with someone who's
• 35:43
  insubordinate when they're right.
• 35:48
  And it turned out he had actually given the award and he gave it because his sense
• 35:53
  was that HP was losing that creativity.
• 35:57
  he said, that'll be an example that people can use as a way to say it's
• 36:01
  okay to go up against your boss.
• 36:03
  when I read about you, I was like it's kind of like you're, a musical artist
• 36:08
  and people keep saying, Play that song.
• 36:09
  You're like oh, I'm sick of playing that song.
• 36:11
  There's way more songs on the album and the nuances and, and that's where
• 36:16
  there's so much richness that people can see and learn from you that I
• 36:21
  really want to talk about today.
• 36:22
  There was a couple of things like that.
• 36:24
  For example, you were so committed to getting this over the line
• 36:28
  where you went out on sales trips yourself and you wanted to take the
• 36:33
  unit to some potential customers.
• 36:35
  You were strongly told, no.
• 36:37
  By hp and they did not allow engineers go alone to customers because they
• 36:43
  had to send a sales rep with you.
• 36:45
  That was one thing.
• 36:46
  Then you couldn't afford extra travel expenses.
• 36:49
  And third, HP didn't allow prototypes to be shown to customers
• 36:52
  in case it tipped off competitors.
• 36:55
  Right.
• 36:56
  you brought it out.
• 36:57
  You had the Volkswagen Beetle, you had your family, you
• 37:00
  adjoined it onto a holiday.
• 37:02
  You used to take out the front seat to be able to fit this unit in.
• 37:06
  So I just wanted to show the commitment of it and then a bit of serendipity,
• 37:11
  unfortunate serendipity for the other guy, a heart attack of one of your colleagues,
• 37:16
  and he wanted to be able to monitor his own heart, and his wife was as a nurse
• 37:20
  Yeah.
• 37:20
  you had immediately an application for your product.
• 37:24
  I'd love you to share some of the serendipitous moments like
• 37:28
  that, but the fact that you put yourself in the way of serendipity
• 37:31
  by actually doing the hard work.
• 37:33
  so even before, you know, Dave asked that we cancel it, I was getting
• 37:38
  pushback from our division that there's no market for this thing.
• 37:44
  I just felt if I could get in front of some people and show
• 37:47
  'em this thing, it would work.
• 37:49
  So we had this Christmas trip scheduled to go back from
• 37:52
  Colorado to Southern California.
• 37:54
  And I ran into this rule that you had to have an HP guy with
• 37:58
  you, a salesperson with you.
• 38:00
  I called the office in Las Cruces, New Mexico and the one near Phoenix.
• 38:05
  And they said, well, that's Christmas holidays.
• 38:07
  You know, we're on vacation.
• 38:09
  And I said, well, I've got this thing I want to show to Bur
• 38:12
  Brown, you know, engineering.
• 38:14
  would it be all right if I went in?
• 38:16
  The guy says, oh sure, be my guest.
• 38:17
  So that's how I got around the salesperson thing.
• 38:20
  Bur Brown was a competitor to HP in Recorders, and I'm there and they said,
• 38:25
  well, why are you showing it to us?
• 38:27
  You know, you compete with us.
• 38:28
  And I said, not in Space video.
• 38:30
  We don't, and because they were showing it to KIPP Peak or somebody who was involved
• 38:35
  in the space program so stuff like that.
• 38:39
  But yeah.
• 38:39
  And this damn box was two foot on a two foot cube.
• 38:43
  Okay.
• 38:44
  And, you know, probably weighed I don't know, 70 pounds or so, I had to take the
• 38:48
  front seat of the Volkswagen out at the hotel, leave it with the family, and go
• 38:53
  get the box at the airport and so forth.
• 38:56
  I took it back to the airport after I'd shown it in New Mexico
• 39:00
  and I handed it to the guy and it's got marked fragile all over.
• 39:03
  I handed it to this guy and he tosses it about 12 feet over to the conveyor belt.
• 39:09
  And as he's tossing it, he said, do you wanna insure it?
• 39:13
  And I said, yeah, for $25,000, I thought he was gonna catch it.
• 39:18
  What the hell's in there?
• 39:21
  I said, it's the only computer display in America.
• 39:25
  Wow.
• 39:25
  And you didn't even know what that meant, I'm sure.
• 39:27
  let's pull on a couple of more threads here.
• 39:29
  There's stuff here that.
• 39:31
  Maybe you didn't see as that important, but they're actually
• 39:35
  like templates for people.
• 39:37
  So one of the problems that you say loomed was that you as a team had no
• 39:42
  priority versus other projects to divide for already overloaded support services.
• 39:47
  And you found a case of beer for the model shop folk.
• 39:51
  So to bring them in for the weekend, you basically bribe them with a keg.
• 39:56
  That's an important thing because one of the problems that you see
• 39:59
  with intrapreneurs like you were then was that you have no power
• 40:04
  and you have no nothing to offer.
• 40:06
  So you have to almost trade in goodwill.
• 40:09
  That was one thing.
• 40:09
  And then as you neared the end, the manufacturing department, which
• 40:13
  had no veto power of o over any new release from the labs voted no
• 40:17
  on building your product as well.
• 40:19
  They're just a couple of little things that I'd love you to riff on.
• 40:23
  Well, the model shop one is, I mean, if you think about who are the important
• 40:27
  cogs in the wheel that never get credit?
• 40:30
  the industrial designer never gets credit.
• 40:33
  the gal on the front desk never gets credit.
• 40:37
  The model shop never gets credit.
• 40:39
  And I came up kind of I won't say dirt poor, but my dad was
• 40:44
  a traveling salesman calling on blacksmith stops and things like that.
• 40:48
  And he taught me early on, treat everybody with the same dignity
• 40:51
  you'd like to be treated with.
• 40:53
  And I went to these guys and I said, , that just looks like
• 40:56
  there's no schedule at all.
• 40:57
  And they said, well, we could always do something after hours.
• 41:01
  And what would that take?
• 41:02
  He said, well, a keg would go a long way.
• 41:05
  And boom, we had that done.
• 41:08
  It really works.
• 41:09
  and I think the secret, what you really outlined there, you have the power of
• 41:15
  persuasion or the power of the pen or the power of, you know, you've got a number of
• 41:23
  resources that may not look obvious, but you have 'em, you can buttonhole people
• 41:29
  and, just the fact that you're excited can get other people excited and you
• 41:35
  know I guess I trade on that sometimes.
• 41:38
  For sure.
• 41:38
  I think that's such an important thing.
• 41:40
  And I wanted to point out a couple of things 'cause you're
• 41:43
  very transparent about this, some of the mistakes that you made.
• 41:46
  And at one stage you were given an opportunity to talk about the program to
• 41:51
  a Divisionwide group, and you naively gave this speech that drew on your experiences
• 41:57
  from the Thomas Kuhn stuff, the four stages that an entrepreneur endures.
• 42:02
  So let's tell about that.
• 42:03
  So maybe I'll tee you up with this.
• 42:04
  You said first your original ideas gets ignored.
• 42:07
  Too radical.
• 42:08
  Second, when the idea grows, it's seen as a threat or the others try to stop it.
• 42:12
  Third, as momentum builds, they try to corrupt debase or emasculate the idea
• 42:18
  to rid of its truly radical capability.
• 42:20
  And then when it succeeds, they're quick to take credit for creating,
• 42:23
  modifying or completing the idea.
• 42:25
  That's the kind of idea mapped to the Kuhn stuff.
• 42:28
  But tell us about what happened to you
• 42:31
  Well,
• 42:32
  result of this.
• 42:33
  yeah, I that was a witless situation really.
• 42:37
  We were one of the outlier divisions for hp.
• 42:39
  Colorado Springs wasn't exactly the center of Hewlett Packard.
• 42:44
  But we had people from Bell Labs came to visit and my boss's boss
• 42:50
  asked, Hey, they're interested in this display that you built.
• 42:54
  Why don't you tell the story of inventing it?
• 42:57
  Over lunch, so we'll have lunch and you can kind of hu for
• 43:00
  15 minutes and it'll be good.
• 43:02
  So that's what I did.
• 43:02
  I told those four little steps which of course didn't put my
• 43:07
  boss in that good of a light.
• 43:09
  The Bell Labs people just went crazy,
• 43:11
  as did some of my colleagues, I would not say any of the managers.
• 43:16
  So we're walking out and this, my boss's boss is walking with me and he
• 43:20
  said, you are fantastic with a speech.
• 43:23
  He said, you are so good.
• 43:24
  You could be on television.
• 43:26
  You know, , you tell a story just beautifully.
• 43:28
  In fact, he says, I think you should be on television.
• 43:31
  I'm taking you outta your job because we can't have you doing what you're doing.
• 43:37
  Until that moment I thought, you know, hey, I'm doing fine.
• 43:39
  You know,, And that was it.
• 43:43
  I, I quit being a project manager that day and for a while, you know?
• 43:48
  But yeah, so be careful what you wish for, right?
• 43:51
  Yeah.
• 43:52
  And they replaced you then, and it was a tough pill to swallow.
• 43:55
  The reason I, I, I share that is it sometimes as an entrepreneur, you're
• 44:00
  happy to be able to get a dig in.
• 44:02
  You know what I mean by that?
• 44:03
  You're, you're happy to, to be able to go.
• 44:05
  Now's my chance to tell those.
• 44:07
  Yep.
• 44:08
  And sos what I feel and actually inadvertently insult the person.
• 44:13
  But that person has the power and they never, ever react
• 44:16
  well to something like that.
• 44:18
  like you discovered.
• 44:20
  I.
• 44:24
  But, but we, we do, I, you know, I, I, I spot it.
• 44:26
  It's a thing we do.
• 44:28
  'cause you feel it's unfair and you feel it's a way to actually
• 44:31
  get some type of justice and it's tough not to take the shot when
• 44:34
  you have the opportunity as well.
• 44:35
  So I wanted to point that out 'cause a few of us have made
• 44:38
  those mistakes over the years.
• 44:40
  So let's fast forward in 1970, you were at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic
• 44:46
  Engineers, an annual international convention on a spying mission.
• 44:50
  So let's take it up from there, because.
• 44:53
  What I loved about this was you got outta the building that
• 44:56
  term that we use, innovation.
• 44:57
  You got out of the building, you got out there to see what's out, what's been
• 45:00
  demoed, and you were really looking at one of your major competitors here and they
• 45:04
  knew you were looking at them as well.
• 45:08
  Well I wouldn't have called it a spying mission.
• 45:11
  It was just simply an information gathering kind of thing.
• 45:15
  And, I didn't think of it as spying, but the net was HP was
• 45:21
  still the doormat in oscilloscopes.
• 45:23
  And, I became project manager of what was gonna become our next generation box.
• 45:32
  And this is 1970.
• 45:34
  Things like liquid crystal displays are possible.
• 45:37
  A lot of different semiconductors we hadn't yet seen the Intel 4,004
• 45:44
  memory chip, but we were right on the cusp of a lot of change
• 45:48
  happening with semiconductors.
• 45:49
  Can we just maybe explain what's an oscillator is because I thought
• 45:53
  I had an idea of what it is, but maybe we'll explain what it is.
• 45:56
  Because , it's important to actually understand what this
• 45:58
  is as the story moves forward.
• 46:00
  Okay.
• 46:00
  Well, so you said oscillator, an oscillator is a signal generator.
• 46:05
  So you can generate square waves or sign waves some kind of signal
• 46:10
  that then a receiver can read that signal and oscilloscope is actually.
• 46:17
  The tool to watch all that.
• 46:19
  So the best way to think about oscilloscope is an EKG machine.
• 46:24
  At the, in medical, you see the thing that does the heartbeat, that's a
• 46:28
  version of a oscilloscope picture.
• 46:31
  And so you can see that in a dynamic way.
• 46:34
  Well, Techtronics had 90% of the worldwide market.
• 46:38
  HP had about 6%.
• 46:41
  You know, ISU was 3% in Japan, and Fairchild had 1%.
• 46:45
  So we were, all of us were doormats to this dominant player
• 46:50
  who'd been there for 25 years.
• 46:52
  So I'm gonna head the next generation for hp project to try
• 46:58
  and deal with their latest offering.
• 47:01
  latest offering had just come out and it was high, wide and handsome.
• 47:06
  I mean, it was glorious compared to anything that'd
• 47:09
  ever been done in the past.
• 47:11
  they're gonna show it at this IEE show in New York.
• 47:16
  across from Central Park.
• 47:19
  and you've gotta wear your name badge.
• 47:20
  Your name badge has your name and your company broadly.
• 47:24
  So it says Chuck House, Hewlett Packard.
• 47:27
  And I was with another fellow We wander into that Techtronics
• 47:31
  booth and they, oh, hi guys.
• 47:33
  We know you ha ha, kind of thing.
• 47:35
  And we're here to see your new box.
• 47:37
  Well, here it is, and everybody in their booth, they had just seen
• 47:41
  it for the first time themselves.
• 47:43
  Techtronics was an Oregon firm, and so the New York show was the first
• 47:48
  time the East Coast for Techtronics.
• 47:50
  People had seen it.
• 47:52
  they're fiddling with this thing and trying to figure out how it works.
• 47:55
  And both of us we're pretty good at scopes, so we can show them, we can show
• 48:00
  their employees how their box worked.
• 48:04
  We did that for, 10 or 15 minutes, had a good time, and we're checking a
• 48:08
  bunch of stuff like linearity and, the corner distortion and all this stuff.
• 48:13
  And and they got and Shannon by what we were finding, then one of them
• 48:18
  says, well, hell, you guys know how to demo our stuff better than we do.
• 48:22
  Why don't you stay in the booth and demo it through the day?
• 48:26
  I mean, talk about an invitation.
• 48:29
  So, So we did, so for five hours we stand there and we demo
• 48:35
  their box to their customers.
• 48:37
  And you get to say, how much good would this do for you?
• 48:40
  What are your real problems?
• 48:41
  And so we're basically doing market research on their customers with
• 48:44
  their machine in their booth.
• 48:47
  And we did that all day long and learned a lot.
• 48:51
  I go home and I basically, my conclusion out of that was we
• 48:55
  have to cancel our project.
• 48:56
  We are so far behind and we're so under-resourced that it'd be ly
• 49:01
  to compete with that we ought to find another arena to compete with.
• 49:06
  And that's where the Logic Analyzer Group came from.
• 49:08
  The sequel, though, some years later, a book came out about techtronics
• 49:14
  a biography, like my HP book.
• 49:16
  Okay.
• 49:17
  And the guy says, there was a time the two guys from Hewlett
• 49:21
  Packard came into their booth.
• 49:24
  can you believe it?
• 49:26
  So it made it into tetros lore as well as in ours.
• 49:31
  there's some really important things here.
• 49:33
  The first thing was, again, this term, get outta the building.
• 49:36
  You said here the real learning was sociological.
• 49:40
  We found out how big their or r and d team was.
• 49:42
  So this is techtronics, the development time and schedules they had.
• 49:46
  And which capabilities they still needed for further refinement.
• 49:50
  The 7,000 series you said was like an overgrown Swiss army knife, but then
• 49:55
  you said you had this realization go, we don't stand a chance with the project
• 49:59
  you called Next Gen. At the time, here's what I thought was so important.
• 50:03
  I shared this actually with.
• 50:05
  I shared this on an episode of the show with a live show we recorded already.
• 50:10
  So I recorded it last week with Alex, Osterwalder Howard
• 50:15
  Yu and Sangeet Choudary.
• 50:17
  Three brilliant minds and innovators and writers on innovation.
• 50:22
  But I told 'em about this.
• 50:23
  I told 'em about your bravery to kill your own project.
• 50:26
  And you said here, the first problem.
• 50:28
  That is what you were in love with it.
• 50:30
  You loved the project.
• 50:32
  And the second was that you viewed this as managerial redemption.
• 50:36
  And now that redemption was turning to suicide.
• 50:40
  And you said here, canceling the project would be a certain death
• 50:43
  knell for my management hopes.
• 50:46
  You had personally defined the program, solo managed it.
• 50:50
  Invested a selected few people in it.
• 50:53
  New technologies built a crackerjack team and made great progress
• 50:57
  compared to historic efforts.
• 50:59
  It was, as you saw it, your chance to recover from some prior
• 51:03
  management miscues, I wanted to talk about that because that bravery
• 51:07
  to kill it when you knew it was wrong, so many people don't do it.
• 51:12
  And just the feeling of that, the honesty of it as well.
• 51:18
  well, trying to get through that period it was like agony.
• 51:22
  , I did love what we'd done.
• 51:24
  We had technology that at that point hadn't been done anywhere.
• 51:29
  And I had a role in bringing some of that.
• 51:33
  fruition.
• 51:33
  So I was energized about how cool it was from a technology standpoint, what
• 51:39
  a contribution it might be, et cetera.
• 51:42
  And I had this vindication need you know, was pretty strong
• 51:47
  I wanted to have that power.
• 51:51
  the issue was the facts were pretty in incontrovertible.
• 51:55
  I mean, damn thing isn't gonna fly, you know?
• 51:58
  And so to preside over and over another year, only to have it go down in flames
• 52:03
  would be suicide in its own right.
• 52:06
  the way I reconciled it was, Hey, do you want to, , would
• 52:08
  you rather die now or later?
• 52:11
  And why not bite the bullet now rather than put another year of
• 52:15
  investment in that's wasted effort.
• 52:19
  And so then, the real question was how do I stand tall to my own team who's working
• 52:25
  their heart out to make this thing work.
• 52:27
  Knowing that I'm gonna urge to cancel it as soon as we show it.
• 52:32
  How can I tell them to keep working hard for the next four weeks?
• 52:37
  And have integrity.
• 52:39
  And I found a way I thought to do that was really to ask them
• 52:45
  to teach me what problems they were having why was it so hard.
• 52:50
  And so they got invested in trying to help me understand what was so
• 52:55
  hard about the assignment that we had and why it was taking 'em forever.
• 53:00
  Okay.
• 53:00
  And it was out of that learning that together we were able to
• 53:04
  formulate the ideas for logic.
• 53:06
  So it really had a positive denouement.
• 53:09
  There were several weeks there where I'm feeling two-faced about,
• 53:12
  knowing I'm gonna kill it and knowing these four bastards are
• 53:15
  working their heart out, you know?
• 53:18
  It's a tough one.
• 53:19
  It's such a tough one.
• 53:20
  And, and you know, it's, it's something that a lot of innovators face.
• 53:23
  They have, they know deep down, but they know it's gonna
• 53:26
  affect them and they have to
• 53:28
  Yeah.
• 53:28
  Wear that mask for a while.
• 53:30
  So we're in 1970 and you've bought six acres, a plant nursery,
• 53:34
  a garden center, all right.
• 53:36
  In the middle of a recession.
• 53:38
  And you're doing some landscaping at the weekend just in case, because
• 53:42
  so many engineers are driving taxis and you're like going, well,
• 53:46
  I worked as a landscaper before.
• 53:47
  I enjoy it.
• 53:48
  This would be better than driving a taxi for me.
• 53:51
  But you, you've worked on this project work, DDU, D-U-D-W-U-K-C-K.
• 53:59
  and you and your team decide to resign until fate steps in,
• 54:04
  as it seemed it so often did.
• 54:06
  And your colleague, Dar Howard, gives you some air cover and
• 54:10
  encourages to, to keep going.
• 54:12
  Let's pick up the story there.
• 54:14
  You fill in the gaps and tell us about D'WUCK.
• 54:17
  I'll tell you a little bit about the landscaping.
• 54:19
  So I do this landscaping thing on the side with my wife and another
• 54:23
  couple that I knew outside hp.
• 54:27
  And one day I'm doing work for one of the guys who worked for me.
• 54:30
  Okay.
• 54:31
  He said, why don't you landscape my yard?
• 54:33
  So I I, I'm up digging holes to plant trees in his backyard and
• 54:39
  his wife is just reading me off.
• 54:42
  You're not digging the right place.
• 54:43
  You're not digging you.
• 54:44
  A fairly unhappy woman and, and really blistering me.
• 54:49
  and he comes home and he sees her berating me and he says, honey, that's my boss.
• 54:58
  Brilliant.
• 54:58
  One of
• 54:59
  Brilliant.
• 54:59
  moments of my life.
• 55:01
  Brilliant,
• 55:01
  so this guy that came home and we had five people on this
• 55:04
  team and we're building this box.
• 55:06
  And it could do a serial trigger.
• 55:09
  So it could handle signals that came in sequence and it could identify a
• 55:13
  sequence, it could do it in parallel.
• 55:16
  It could do five or six signals or eight signals at once and recognize the pattern.
• 55:22
  So we had a parallel trigger.
• 55:23
  We had a serial trigger, we had a countdown mechanism.
• 55:27
  We had something else.
• 55:28
  I've forgotten what else.
• 55:29
  And so we called it the digital waveform conditioner.
• 55:33
  And so d was for digital.
• 55:37
  WU was for . Waveform, underlying computer knowledge or some, I don't know.
• 55:43
  Anyway, and it was a little plugin for oscilloscope.
• 55:45
  And so the notion was we have to show this to somebody and figure out if it matters.
• 55:49
  And the only place you could show it, that would matter.
• 55:52
  Inside HP was the HP computer Division in bay Area, we're in Colorado Springs.
• 55:59
  Travel money was always pretty tight.
• 56:02
  So what I figured out was, I'm gonna go on vacation to Canada.
• 56:07
  It took the family we drove to Banff.
• 56:11
  We drove over to Vancouver.
• 56:12
  We drove down the coast, stopped in Seattle.
• 56:15
  People were laying off engineers in Seattle.
• 56:18
  This was the height of the recession for the seventies recession when the
• 56:23
  military money ended after Vietnam.
• 56:27
  And anyway, get to Palo Alto and my team has just arrived and they've got the box.
• 56:33
  And we're glad to see each other.
• 56:35
  And we go to this show and we turn it on with, I don't know, 25 computer engineers
• 56:41
  in the room and smoke fills the room.
• 56:44
  The thing just blows up.
• 56:46
  And the guy, one of the designers was Swiss German,
• 56:51
  he starts babbling in German.
• 56:53
  Mm-hmm.
• 56:54
  And basically saying, this is not good.
• 56:57
  This is not good.
• 56:59
  food, this food.
• 57:01
  And it wasn't, we just burned the damn thing up.
• 57:03
  So it turned out a guy gave us, one of the guy who set the meeting up said,
• 57:09
  you're gonna need some repair time.
• 57:11
  This was like on a Monday.
• 57:13
  gave us three days in his workshop.
• 57:16
  We put it together.
• 57:17
  We had it working by Thursday, he couldn't get the 25 people,
• 57:21
  he got like four to come.
• 57:24
  They watch it and they said, we have never seen these kinds of signals.
• 57:29
  How are you doing this?
• 57:30
  So we have this great discussion about how it works.
• 57:33
  And then he said, kind of offhand, he says, I've got a friend over
• 57:36
  at IBM San Jose ought to see this.
• 57:40
  me give him a call.
• 57:42
  Okay.
• 57:43
  HP's got this thing.
• 57:44
  You never show a prototype to anybody to, 'cause you're give away the story, right?
• 57:49
  So it's just like the displays thing.
• 57:51
  said, well, I don't know.
• 57:52
  But he said, no, you really ought to do it.
• 57:54
  So we went down to see these guys.
• 57:57
  It turns out it was the team that designed the first Winchester disc drive.
• 58:01
  And they didn't advertise it that way, but that's who it was.
• 58:05
  And we show it to 'em.
• 58:06
  They didn't want us to leave the building.
• 58:08
  They said, you've gotta leave that with us.
• 58:10
  Wow, that is unbelievable.
• 58:12
  Okay.
• 58:13
  So, no, we gotta have it.
• 58:15
  So we're driving back to the airport and one of the, one of the team members
• 58:19
  says, we might have something here.
• 58:22
  Yeah.
• 58:24
  You think so?
• 58:25
  So that's that story.
• 58:27
  Now the sequel was, HP, Colorado Springs had a hard time hearing that story.
• 58:31
  So I tell that story also in the book, but that's how that happened.
• 58:36
  Yeah.
• 58:36
  So let's keep going on the ups and downs, because now you're
• 58:39
  at a new dawn, quite literally.
• 58:41
  It's New Year's Eve, 1971.
• 58:43
  You had lost your team to a gent called Jim Pettit, but now you have them back.
• 58:48
  But there's a twist here because you inherit some new engineers.
• 58:52
  The reason I mentioned this is it's a common occurrence in intrapreneurship,
• 58:56
  and as you put it, compared to my original team, seven of the eight
• 59:00
  designers were senior unexpectedly they brought a product, marketing manager,
• 59:05
  Dick Cochrane, five Scope lab designers.
• 59:08
  Rounded it out, none with standout skills.
• 59:12
  The whole feeling to me seemed to resemble that of an expansion baseball
• 59:17
  team in Major League where every extant owner offered the new team
• 59:22
  some utility infielders, disabled ball players or fading stars, none.
• 59:28
  Were invested in having the new team produce a winning club in their near
• 59:32
  future and later on in the book you add "intrapreneurs often are saddled with
• 59:37
  team members who aren't there by choice with a point of view firmly rooted in the
• 59:42
  old paradigm." That was gold because that is a problem that's still everywhere.
• 59:48
  Well, that's, I mean, the nature of these businesses I mean, these are
• 59:52
  a lot of people that may have been good in their day, but they're, their
• 59:55
  creative juices have already been killed.
• 59:57
  You know, they parked their brain at the door, you know, three years ago
• 1:00:01
  or eight years ago, and they're just hanging on, you know, they're collecting
• 1:00:05
  a paycheck, and that's about it, as some would say they could fog a mirror,
• 1:00:09
  but that's about the extent of it.
• 1:00:13
  So that's what you, so it's luck of the draw, you know, and, these are
• 1:00:17
  designed by committee, they're designed pretty much by who's left over.
• 1:00:22
  Or who can't you stand and you don't want them part of your
• 1:00:25
  team because they're, et cetera.
• 1:00:27
  And that's what we got and, the story at HP always was, we're this paternalistic.
• 1:00:33
  You know, we'll find a job for you, don't worry.
• 1:00:36
  This is lifetime employment.
• 1:00:38
  This is back in the sixties and seventies.
• 1:00:40
  But anyway, we got 20 people or so assigned to us.
• 1:00:48
  A couple of 'em were really hard to work with.
• 1:00:53
  One of them been in my college freshman group and flunked out, and when he came
• 1:00:59
  to our division and saw that I was there, it was like, he wanted to exit stage left.
• 1:01:04
  But he wound up staying.
• 1:01:05
  We were not terribly collegial, and now he's ordered to work for
• 1:01:10
  me, well, you can guess the rest.
• 1:01:12
  Anyway, we had 20 people at the end of the year.
• 1:01:15
  We still had 20 people, but we had gone through 80 names.
• 1:01:20
  It basically was , we weren't trying to be a, it wasn't a guillotine kind of thing.
• 1:01:25
  It was just, this is what we're working on.
• 1:01:27
  What do you know about it?
• 1:01:29
  And the guy would call in, Monday and say, I don't think that's my call.
• 1:01:32
  And so we wound up able to construct a team actually over
• 1:01:37
  a year's time that pretty much believed in what we were doing.
• 1:01:41
  I was gonna do a recap of where we are here, because you do that, this in the
• 1:01:45
  book, well, you say, challenges abounded.
• 1:01:48
  Six months after taking over the original scope for program from Jim
• 1:01:52
  Petze, many doubted your ability to manage others, questioned the vision.
• 1:01:57
  Most seemed uncertain that the strategic and tactical plans.
• 1:02:01
  Produce positive results.
• 1:02:02
  To be truthful, in the dead of the night, my self-doubts were substantial.
• 1:02:06
  July, 1972 marked my 10th HP anniversary, all with the Scope Division.
• 1:02:12
  A resume showed management of two programs, seven design projects, one
• 1:02:17
  investigation, two circuit designs, and a McGraw Hill book chapter.
• 1:02:22
  The first project sold well to recoup its development costs.
• 1:02:25
  The large screen display program discounted my management ability, even
• 1:02:30
  though it earned substantial profits.
• 1:02:33
  And you created a very useful chart, you called it the six
• 1:02:36
  Stages of leadership capability.
• 1:02:39
  And I'd love to share this on the screen because.
• 1:02:42
  Today's episode coincides with there's a thing called the Drucker Forum and Vienna,
• 1:02:47
  they're friends of the innovation show
• 1:02:49
  Okay.
• 1:02:49
  every year they have this two day event to celebrate the work of Peter Drucker.
• 1:02:53
  But he had a major influence on your career and particularly
• 1:02:57
  to help you develop this.
• 1:02:58
  So I'm gonna show it on the screen, Chuck, and I'd love you to take us through
• 1:03:02
  what you did here, because you've used it since and you still tend to use it.
• 1:03:07
  so the antecedent to this you get picked be a leader because
• 1:03:14
  you've done some past good work.
• 1:03:17
  Okay.
• 1:03:17
  I mean, you wouldn't have the job if somebody didn't believe in you.
• 1:03:21
  And the way they got to believe in you was, you made something happen.
• 1:03:24
  Well, okay.
• 1:03:26
  And so when you were doing that, clearly you knew what you were doing.
• 1:03:31
  You were probably down here in, in e and F for the past project.
• 1:03:35
  You had the vision and the plan, and you pulled it off and
• 1:03:38
  so you get the new job, okay?
• 1:03:40
  And the new job is to go into this new arena, the DWUCK arena,
• 1:03:44
  if you will, where, you know, basically no one knows the rules.
• 1:03:50
  And so my description is, okay, what we're supposed to do is solve the problem of,
• 1:03:56
  digital measurements on Logic Circuits.
• 1:03:59
  No one knows anything about.
• 1:04:01
  Well, I call that a drift at sea.
• 1:04:04
  I have no notion of what to do, and neither does anyone else on the team.
• 1:04:08
  So we're a drift at sea.
• 1:04:11
  The characteristic of a drift at sea is direction you paddle might be wrong.
• 1:04:17
  Right.
• 1:04:18
  And then few things start to sort themselves out.
• 1:04:22
  And you say, I think, I think if we work on probing for multiple leads of the guy
• 1:04:27
  that I was digging the holes for I think if we work on some small probes so we can
• 1:04:33
  get to multiple leads, that'd be useful.
• 1:04:36
  I'm not sure that's the right thing to be working on, but I know it could be useful.
• 1:04:40
  Okay.
• 1:04:41
  And then you do a bunch of those and then you say, well, if we do those
• 1:04:45
  and use that to do parallel triggers, that feels like a right thing to do.
• 1:04:50
  It might not be enough, but it's at least the right thing to be working on.
• 1:04:56
  And then you say, we need more than par, we need parallel, we
• 1:04:59
  need serial, we need countdown.
• 1:05:01
  you need a host of these things.
• 1:05:02
  That's kind of the vision, but you have no idea How to package it yet, how to
• 1:05:07
  even invent some of those circuits.
• 1:05:09
  And then, together with several of your colleagues, you come up with,
• 1:05:13
  well, we could do it this way.
• 1:05:15
  And now you think you've got a vision and a plan.
• 1:05:18
  But when you're talking to the wider team, they say, well, now wait a minute.
• 1:05:23
  You know, you've been screwing around on this for a year and a half.
• 1:05:26
  You know, why should I believe that?
• 1:05:29
  it is still like slideware, if you will.
• 1:05:32
  And then eventually you get the team aligned and you pull it off.
• 1:05:36
  , I'll share that with the audience.
• 1:05:37
  I actually showed that to a scale up company yesterday and I said,
• 1:05:41
  look, this is really useful.
• 1:05:42
  You should actually check this out.
• 1:05:44
  'cause I was reading your book at the time and I was like, going check that out.
• 1:05:47
  And they're like going, oh geez, we could do it that.
• 1:05:49
  So it's a, it's a very useful thing and you got it.
• 1:05:52
  Then the team to check in with it on a regular basis.
• 1:05:55
  O, where are we on this?
• 1:05:57
  Which is really, really useful.
• 1:05:59
  I think that people do that and really importantly, you say, if you don't have
• 1:06:03
  a vision yourself, how the heck do you think the team's gonna have a vision?
• 1:06:07
  And it's important to articulate that regularly.
• 1:06:11
  So one of the issues you, you could think where you are is maybe at level five, but
• 1:06:18
  most of your team is still at level three.
• 1:06:21
  You know, they're saying, are you sure this thing I'm working on is
• 1:06:24
  the right thing to be working on?
• 1:06:26
  And you're down here saying, well, I need that and I need this and
• 1:06:29
  they're not buying into any of that.
• 1:06:31
  They're questioning what they're doing themselves, you know?
• 1:06:34
  And so, so yeah, they're, it is a spectrum here that and one of
• 1:06:39
  the real tricks is you can get all the way down to the bottom.
• 1:06:43
  You think you've got it and you can't persuade anybody else.
• 1:06:49
  Now you can put this in a startup in 2025 say, okay, I've gotta convince a bunch
• 1:06:56
  of venture capitalists about this idea.
• 1:07:00
  they go, what?
• 1:07:01
  Are you kidding me?
• 1:07:02
  You know?
• 1:07:03
  Huh.
• 1:07:05
  So, a quick story about a different field, when the networking business came along,
• 1:07:12
  a bunch of companies got funded by venture capitalists to do local area networks.
• 1:07:17
  Was the most prominent company that came out of that period.
• 1:07:22
  one company, actually about five companies, thought that
• 1:07:25
  connecting networks to networks would be very interesting.
• 1:07:28
  Instead of connecting computers to a network, they said, we ought
• 1:07:32
  to connect networks to networks.
• 1:07:35
  and Cisco , is the prominent company that came out of that period.
• 1:07:41
  Three Com got like 42 venture capitalists backing them.
• 1:07:45
  Cisco got none out of their first 78 inquiries.
• 1:07:51
  You know, and yet they made five times what?
• 1:07:53
  Three com ever made?
• 1:07:55
  we're, we're doing one right now with multiple pictures, multiple simultaneous
• 1:08:02
  pictures that are pixel streamed.
• 1:08:05
  Okay.
• 1:08:05
  Which may not sound like a lot, but it's a big deal.
• 1:08:08
  We've got 40 patents on it and we show it to people and they all say.
• 1:08:14
  pictures.
• 1:08:14
  Why would you wanna see multiple pictures?
• 1:08:17
  You know?
• 1:08:18
  I mean, can't you just go through a PowerPoint deck and
• 1:08:20
  see one picture after another?
• 1:08:22
  Well, sure you can, but you can't compare 'em, you know, and their
• 1:08:26
  eyes glaze over and you go, guys, well, zoom is a good example.
• 1:08:31
  I invented a bunch of stuff like Zoom and was using it 15 years
• 1:08:36
  ago for ACM wanted to use it.
• 1:08:40
  Three years before COVID came out and they laughed about, you
• 1:08:45
  know, what are you talking about?
• 1:08:46
  You'd have to teach people how to use it.
• 1:08:48
  I had to mail things for how to dress and how to turn the lights on and
• 1:08:52
  all this crap, and then it happens.
• 1:08:55
  And today it's an adjective, you know, let's zoom, right?
• 1:09:00
  It's almost laughable from the entrepreneurial standpoint
• 1:09:03
  to watch these evolutions
• 1:09:05
  they come back time and time again.
• 1:09:08
  it's like the technology's the only different thing.
• 1:09:10
  It's just whatever the entrepreneur has found has changed.
• 1:09:14
  But there was a couple of really important things like you got your
• 1:09:17
  team outta the building and one of the things just to say on vision
• 1:09:21
  is there that I'll share as well.
• 1:09:23
  you also have a second graph that's perspectives on vision, like you say,
• 1:09:27
  where it shows different persons.
• 1:09:29
  Viewpoint on where they are versus where you are.
• 1:09:32
  You might be clear, they may not be not, and the other person
• 1:09:35
  on the team may not be either.
• 1:09:37
  But in section two, you spoke of getting the nerds outta the
• 1:09:41
  building to meet customers.
• 1:09:44
  Few of them knew what to do, so very few of them knew what
• 1:09:48
  to do and what to look for.
• 1:09:50
  And you said, well, if you knew what to look for, you didn't need to go.
• 1:09:53
  And, and I, and I wanted to link it back to something.
• 1:09:58
  Bill Hewitt co-founder of HP said, he said, first marketing is too important
• 1:10:04
  to leave up to marketing people.
• 1:10:05
  And second, . We believe in the next bench syndrome.
• 1:10:10
  I thought that was a really important term, and I'd love you to share this term,
• 1:10:14
  the next bench syndrome in hp, but also what you did about paying for engineers to
• 1:10:21
  get out and meet customers so they could actually see what the heck they needed.
• 1:10:26
  Well, so, so the basic issue with engineers traveling?
• 1:10:30
  First of all, these are mostly a reclusive, introspective
• 1:10:35
  nerd type personality.
• 1:10:37
  Okay.
• 1:10:38
  I mean, a little stereotypical, but basically these are not
• 1:10:41
  your outgoing, glad-handing marketing or sales personality.
• 1:10:46
  Okay.
• 1:10:47
  So, so HP had long since decided you never wanna send somebody like
• 1:10:51
  that out to see a real customer.
• 1:10:53
  My god.
• 1:10:54
  You know, it would, it would be deflating for all concerned.
• 1:10:57
  So, so.
• 1:10:59
  Rule number one is you, you're just not gonna send the engineering team out.
• 1:11:03
  rule number two , is you don't have any travel money anyway.
• 1:11:07
  That is not an allowed kind of thing, you know, we'll have, we'll have a little
• 1:11:11
  bit for a beer bust once a quarter.
• 1:11:14
  And we might have a little bit for, you know, the head person
• 1:11:17
  to travel a couple times.
• 1:11:19
  But that's pretty much it.
• 1:11:21
  Well, travel takes money and it's clear expense money.
• 1:11:25
  It is not capital equipment, it's not et cetera.
• 1:11:28
  So we had to overcome those two kinds of things in terms of my bosses giving
• 1:11:35
  me approval to have a travel budget.
• 1:11:38
  Okay.
• 1:11:38
  and to have these uncooth you know, personalities traveling
• 1:11:43
  out to see a real customer.
• 1:11:45
  I mean, they would talk about, well, we ought to have him get, buy some
• 1:11:48
  new clothes or, or one was we end to teach him some basic hygiene, you
• 1:11:53
  know, not to pick his nose in public.
• 1:11:54
  And, you know, I mean, is amazing the things people came up with.
• 1:11:59
  But, the notion I had was everyone has to take two trips a year, and
• 1:12:05
  when they get back, they have to report to the group what they saw.
• 1:12:09
  Okay.
• 1:12:10
  And even if it's hardly anything.
• 1:12:13
  And did I have the story about the kid that mailed his airline tickets?
• 1:12:18
  Yeah, you did
• 1:12:20
  So we had one guy, this guy had two master's degrees, was working on a
• 1:12:24
  PhD and we, said, where should I go?
• 1:12:27
  And we said, Atlanta.
• 1:12:29
  he said, I don't know where that is.
• 1:12:31
  I said, well, we gotta a map out, you know, this is where you go.
• 1:12:33
  He gets to the airport and he stuffs his airline tickets in the mailbox and he
• 1:12:39
  hands his utility bill to the ticket guy.
• 1:12:43
  and I thought if there's ever a Friday in signal that this guy didn't
• 1:12:47
  want to go on the trip, there it is.
• 1:12:48
  I love the fact that you did that because they could now actually see
• 1:12:53
  in the field, this idea get outside of the building is so important and
• 1:12:57
  now it's kind of taken for granted.
• 1:12:59
  But you were doing this well ahead of the time.
• 1:13:02
  Well, it wasn't conventional at the time, and we had in fact, you know, the
• 1:13:06
  problem of synchronizing two computers basically had, it's almost like the
• 1:13:11
  doing the two networks tied together.
• 1:13:14
  The idea of tying two logic analyzers and synchronizing in between
• 1:13:18
  two computers hadn't been done.
• 1:13:21
  I had even my best engineers explaining why that was unnecessary.
• 1:13:25
  It wasn't Dick Cochran, I think it was Bruce Farley one of our marketing
• 1:13:28
  guys says, well, why don't we just go up and see how that works, right?
• 1:13:32
  So we go up to this Fort Collins division, it was 130 miles north.
• 1:13:36
  And we hook this stuff up and they go ape shit over how neat this is.
• 1:13:41
  Wow.
• 1:13:42
  You can see things that saved me a six months of design time,
• 1:13:45
  you know, that kind of thing.
• 1:13:47
  And our guys on the way, we stopped for dinner and one of 'em says, you
• 1:13:50
  know, maybe we ought to include that.
• 1:13:53
  Okay, so I love this because this is stuff that again, we take it for granted.
• 1:13:58
  You fall in love with your own idea.
• 1:14:00
  Your team initially wouldn't listen to joining devices together so they
• 1:14:04
  could communicate with each other.
• 1:14:06
  They didn't see the value in that, but getting outta the building,
• 1:14:10
  show them it, you know, and even, not that they still resisted,
• 1:14:13
  a sequel on that.
• 1:14:14
  I'm sitting in a talk by Irving Jacobs, the founder of Qualcomm, At the Computer
• 1:14:20
  History Museum, like 35 years later, and he stands up and he tells the
• 1:14:26
  entire audience, audience of 600 people.
• 1:14:29
  He said what made it work for Qualcomm was we were able to show IBM how
• 1:14:34
  to link two computers together.
• 1:14:36
  And we did it with a logic analyzer from Hewlett Packard.
• 1:14:40
  And I go up and see him later.
• 1:14:42
  It turns out it was my seventh sale.
• 1:14:46
  We sold seven total units when he bought that.
• 1:14:49
  And, you know, and he shook my hand.
• 1:14:51
  I mean, it was one of, again, that's the credit that an entrepreneur lives for.
• 1:14:56
  You know, I, I didn't get anything.
• 1:14:58
  I didn't get a big plaque from Qualcomm.
• 1:15:01
  I don't need one.
• 1:15:02
  I had the founder tell me I made his company successful.
• 1:15:06
  Wow.
• 1:15:06
  Brilliant, brilliant.
• 1:15:08
  And you know, there was a couple of things in here, so.
• 1:15:11
  At one stage you lost it.
• 1:15:14
  So there's a meeting where your sales guy says a projection of 6.6 million,
• 1:15:20
  and you're like, that's bull crap.
• 1:15:21
  We do much better than that.
• 1:15:23
  Add 10 to it.
• 1:15:24
  So let's pick it up from here.
• 1:15:26
  So we launched a primitive product that had sold, I don't know, maybe 2.9 million,
• 1:15:34
  maybe not even that the first year.
• 1:15:36
  Oh, it was 2.4 million as I remember it.
• 1:15:39
  next year, 3.9.
• 1:15:41
  And now we had two new products ready to launch.
• 1:15:46
  And the way HP worked at the time is you went out the marketing
• 1:15:49
  manager for your division.
• 1:15:51
  And I was still a project team within the division, not my own division.
• 1:15:55
  And he goes out and he gets a forecast, he sets a forecast
• 1:15:59
  with all of the sales teams.
• 1:16:01
  he came back proudly saying, I got him to go all the way to 16 five or to 6.5
• 1:16:07
  or 6.6, I've forgotten up from 3.9.
• 1:16:12
  He's gotten him to go, you know, like
• 1:16:16
  Okay.
• 1:16:17
  And he's just proud as punch.
• 1:16:19
  And I just blew a head gasca, you know, for Christ's sake, you know, it
• 1:16:23
  ought to be million more than that.
• 1:16:26
  It ought to be 16, six, not six, six.
• 1:16:28
  and stormed out of the meeting.
• 1:16:29
  I, have been some other words involved.
• 1:16:33
  I don't remember exactly, you know, wouldn't play on national television,
• 1:16:39
  but, left pretty heated.
• 1:16:41
  Okay.
• 1:16:42
  He took it personally.
• 1:16:44
  And you know, he was really upset and I got counseling, you know, they wanted
• 1:16:49
  me to go see a, a psychologist about how to talk to people but as it also
• 1:16:54
  turned out, he and I made up and the division manager got behind it and we
• 1:17:00
  put together a brilliant sales plan.
• 1:17:03
  and in particular, the guy that I challenged, Bob McVeety, was his name, put
• 1:17:07
  together the belt buckle award program.
• 1:17:11
  these things became one of the greatest chops 'cause you could ever imagined.
• 1:17:18
  now the sequel was, we didn't hit 16.6, but we doubled the six six.
• 1:17:22
  We did 12.9, I think it was the number, something like that.
• 1:17:26
  then I found everybody felt we had missed.
• 1:17:31
  And, and they, it was a downer.
• 1:17:33
  And I'm thinking did 200% of what the guy thought was stupendous.
• 1:17:39
  We didn't, we did wonders.
• 1:17:42
  No, no.
• 1:17:42
  We missed our target,
• 1:17:44
  That killed me, man.
• 1:17:45
  That absolutely killed me.
• 1:17:46
  believe it.
• 1:17:47
  and I had so much empathy here, i'll actually quote it here.
• 1:17:50
  You say.
• 1:17:50
  And, and I really want our audience , to recall that you added 10 million
• 1:17:55
  here to the 6.6 in the first place.
• 1:17:57
  In fact, you risked things by losing it in that meeting to make your point.
• 1:18:02
  But for the fiscal year, 1976, the Logic Analyzer Group booked 12.9
• 1:18:07
  million in orders and delivered $11.8 million to customers.
• 1:18:13
  Though well short of the 16.6 million goal, it was almost double what the
• 1:18:18
  Salesforce quota had been and tripled the sales of the previous year.
• 1:18:22
  The group
• 1:18:22
  sold several hundred units per month, accumulating $38 million in revenues
• 1:18:27
  with 17% margins over the next three years, yielding a respectable
• 1:18:31
  $3.25 million return on investment.
• 1:18:36
  You were both earning your way and getting external press by this point.
• 1:18:41
  You'd established HP as the logic analyzer leader in the world, and you taught the
• 1:18:45
  salesforce a lesson, but you weren't prepared for the reaction in the overall
• 1:18:50
  division or even within your own group.
• 1:18:52
  People had internalized 16.6 million or bust, which was your
• 1:18:56
  line to the point that 12.9 million seemed a monumental disaster.
• 1:19:01
  Nothing you could say was able to change people's minds.
• 1:19:05
  You were tarred with a loser label within the larger division.
• 1:19:09
  People even in your own logic division, felt that you'd been
• 1:19:12
  whipped support from the division and executive team waned both for your
• 1:19:17
  group and your leadership what to do.
• 1:19:20
  Your staff was dumbfounded.
• 1:19:22
  What was the division executive team missing?
• 1:19:25
  And this is what I'd love you to share.
• 1:19:27
  It hit you hard.
• 1:19:28
  I shared this actually with a group of a private group of people from the
• 1:19:33
  innovation show subscriber list today.
• 1:19:36
  Of course you say none of them had ever lived the problem.
• 1:19:40
  Your team had visited designers with the problem.
• 1:19:44
  AMW attendees had the problem.
• 1:19:47
  The HP division staff had only seen PowerPoint slides.
• 1:19:50
  Well, actually I put PowerPoint slides in then.
• 1:19:53
  I don't think it existed actually back then.
• 1:19:58
  Yeah.
• 1:20:00
  Yeah.
• 1:20:01
  So that, that point, I think, so I, I wanted to share firstly, you were a hero.
• 1:20:06
  Like you, you'd done a , massive thing, but by over promising and under
• 1:20:11
  delivering, you were labeled a loser.
• 1:20:13
  And we do that in innovation.
• 1:20:14
  We do that and we feel we've done great job here.
• 1:20:18
  And then we're absolutely angry with the company for going what I'm
• 1:20:23
  after making, I plucked this outta my brain to build this for you,
• 1:20:27
  and now you're punishing me for it.
• 1:20:28
  and that's one visceral feeling.
• 1:20:31
  But then.
• 1:20:31
  When you calm down and you went, actually, the problem here is they don't
• 1:20:36
  actually even know what I'm talking about because all this , is a slide to them.
• 1:20:40
  I don't know if you watched America's elections on Tuesday, but we have
• 1:20:44
  a mayor of New York and a new governor of Virginia, overpromised.
• 1:20:51
  They're so exultant with what they did.
• 1:20:53
  they promised, the moon.
• 1:20:55
  And I'm just sitting there thinking to myself, don't do that in public.
• 1:21:00
  You know, don't do that.
• 1:21:02
  what we did was we built a seminar to teach our, the larger
• 1:21:08
  division what we actually do.
• 1:21:11
  Is that, is that what you're referring to?
• 1:21:12
  it was firstly the feeling, that feeling, because I'm sure that's happened you
• 1:21:17
  before or you've seen other people do it
• 1:21:19
  it's a conflicted feeling.
• 1:21:21
  You know, you blew it away and yet you're not being honored for it,
• 1:21:25
  it's pretty easy to get discouraged.
• 1:21:27
  This is, a point at which a lot of people leave the corporation.
• 1:21:32
  Of the people I've known that have left the company angry, almost always something
• 1:21:38
  like that, they thought they'd actually scored and they didn't get credit, or
• 1:21:44
  even worse, they got thrown at 'em.
• 1:21:47
  like you said earlier on, that you kind of had to keep your head down for a while.
• 1:21:50
  The feeling, I've been there, the feeling of that is horrible.
• 1:21:54
  You feel, and you're so angry and you feel ashamed and you, you,
• 1:21:58
  there's so much mixed emotions.
• 1:22:01
  Certainly, could be an emotional guy than I was,
• 1:22:06
  . so this realization then of, okay, they don't understand and
• 1:22:10
  then you flip to be an educator, this made so much sense to me.
• 1:22:14
  I actually left industry to become an educator of sorts because of that.
• 1:22:18
  I lecture now, I do workshops, I do keynotes.
• 1:22:22
  I started the show 'cause I was like going, this is the problem.
• 1:22:26
  They actually don't know what problems you see.
• 1:22:29
  And as innovators sometimes you can see around the corner and you can see
• 1:22:32
  things so clearly because you have different information than they do.
• 1:22:36
  And maybe you have a bit of imagination as well.
• 1:22:39
  But you can connect these dots going forward, and they're so focused on running
• 1:22:44
  the business that they miss those things.
• 1:22:47
  And this is one of the things I noticed in the HP way was that
• 1:22:50
  the company said, oh, let's make engineers able to innovate everywhere.
• 1:22:54
  And I'm like going, what?
• 1:22:56
  Yeah.
• 1:22:57
  say that in the HP way, but that's not what happens in the divisions.
• 1:23:00
  Like, what happened, Chuck?
• 1:23:02
  So let me, let me, you just triggered something when you
• 1:23:05
  talked about your own work.
• 1:23:07
  So when I sat down to write the HP phenomenon, which is a big
• 1:23:12
  book, 600 plus pages we wanted to tell the story of HP Innovation.
• 1:23:18
  And I had a colleague and we told our story basically, we had five or six old
• 1:23:24
  timers read it, and they all came back and said, you're telling your story.
• 1:23:28
  You're not telling the corporate story or the company story, right?
• 1:23:32
  So how do you do that?
• 1:23:33
  Well, you go interview a whole bunch of people to ask 'em what
• 1:23:37
  their piece of the story is.
• 1:23:38
  And we interviewed about 500 people, okay?
• 1:23:41
  And ultimately, it took us three drafts to get a book that we
• 1:23:45
  liked and they liked pretty well.
• 1:23:47
  And I'm proud of that book.
• 1:23:49
  But the key is this, in interviewing those people, while sitting on the
• 1:23:55
  Computer History Museum board for years, I kept comparing what I was
• 1:24:01
  hearing in my interviews with what they were getting in their interviews.
• 1:24:06
  Now, what they had was historians going back and reading the papers and then maybe
• 1:24:10
  having a spot interview with somebody.
• 1:24:13
  And, and they were very plastic, they were very shallow or misguided, or came
• 1:24:20
  at it from a historian's perspective, not an engineer's perspective.
• 1:24:25
  And so I wound up actually revamping both their oral history program and
• 1:24:31
  one for the computing association.
• 1:24:35
  And I've done, and also for Cisco, I did the Cisco Foundation history.
• 1:24:40
  And what I found is you've gotta do a Socratic interview
• 1:24:44
  of the people who did the work.
• 1:24:47
  Huh.
• 1:24:48
  And you get altogether different stories.
• 1:24:51
  You get the emotion, you get the why, you get the, you know,
• 1:24:54
  it's, it is not what and how.
• 1:24:58
  It's who and why and they're so different and you actual need them all.
• 1:25:03
  Talk about late life learning and and I've had more fun the last 15 years
• 1:25:08
  doing that than anything I've ever done.
• 1:25:11
  Talk about an insight.
• 1:25:12
  you just made me think of Steve Jobs, you know, the whole
• 1:25:15
  idea of the Victor's right?
• 1:25:16
  History, I'm sure Steve's jobs biography is very different from the actual
• 1:25:21
  story of the engineers on the ground.
• 1:25:24
  There's one last thing I wanted to show because you're in a problem
• 1:25:28
  time at this stage, and then comes this brilliant moment and I wanted
• 1:25:32
  to share it because again, it's just.
• 1:25:35
  If you're lucky here, sometimes things land on your lap and you landed on this
• 1:25:39
  magazine at the time Electronics Magazine.
• 1:25:42
  You were celebrated, you were lauded for your achievement for build, building
• 1:25:46
  a product, and you were celebrated and brought to an event as well.
• 1:25:50
  Maybe we'll just finish today with that 'cause it's a nice cherry on top to say
• 1:25:55
  and a nice positive way to finish that.
• 1:25:57
  You actually did really well here and you were recognized
• 1:25:59
  for it, which is great to see.
• 1:26:02
  Well, yeah, so we had the antecedent to that was in let's say June.
• 1:26:08
  This is October 77 is when that issue came out.
• 1:26:11
  Something like March or so of 75 electronics came to the, our
• 1:26:18
  division and said, we wanna know about, what's really going on.
• 1:26:22
  And bill Fehrenbach and I drew the short straw Bill's.
• 1:26:26
  Bill's.
• 1:26:26
  The guy that was my college, you know, friend who.
• 1:26:32
  And he was sort of my antithesis in logic for a while.
• 1:26:35
  Anyway they wanted to know, and we said, the problem is
• 1:26:39
  that electronics is over with.
• 1:26:40
  I know that's the title of your book, it's it's really the data domain.
• 1:26:45
  It used to be the frequency domain.
• 1:26:47
  That's how you built, all the cw communication world.
• 1:26:53
  it was the time domain that's oscilloscopes and switching circuits.
• 1:26:57
  Now it's the data domain, you know, it's ones and zeros.
• 1:27:01
  They were so skeptical.
• 1:27:02
  It was unbelievable, and we had this.
• 1:27:05
  four hour discussion with three of their editors, and Bill and
• 1:27:09
  I, and they said, well, why don't you write us some articles?
• 1:27:12
  So we wrote two articles.
• 1:27:14
  I wrote the first one he wrote the second they ran in May of 75, and June.
• 1:27:21
  And then as it unfolded, you know, this field took off.
• 1:27:26
  two years later, they came back and said, okay, bingo, you win this
• 1:27:30
  award and we're gonna host you, you know, in New York and all that.
• 1:27:33
  It's pretty nice.
• 1:27:35
  and I was still, I still had the Beard Mountain Man is what my wife called me.
• 1:27:41
  I got back there and Bill Moore, great guy is a classic general manager, or in
• 1:27:48
  this case president of a small company.
• 1:27:50
  He didn't have a foggiest idea of what a logic analyzer did, at least
• 1:27:54
  to my perception, and I was shocked.
• 1:27:58
  you know, realized, okay, what happened was they had some intrapreneurs did
• 1:28:04
  really well, and he was able to let 'em, which is all by itself, But we
• 1:28:10
  didn't have anything to fear from them.
• 1:28:12
  we are gonna just own this space.
• 1:28:14
  So that came out of it.
• 1:28:16
  And it was a great dinner on the 14th floor.
• 1:28:19
  I got a bronze plaque, and they tried to even chisel my beard into that damn thing.
• 1:28:24
  And I could show you that, you know, later.
• 1:28:27
  But it was great for, but you mentioned Steve Jobs too.
• 1:28:32
  Walt Isaacson wrote the, the chief biography of Steve Jobs.
• 1:28:37
  Forgot to mention that it took Steve eight years to turn Apple
• 1:28:41
  profitable after he came back.
• 1:28:44
  Seven years of nothing.
• 1:28:46
  was there for most of the time.
• 1:28:48
  And, we know all sorts of backstories on Apple,
• 1:28:51
  Yeah, you'd write a very different book if you tell that story,
• 1:28:54
  yeah.
• 1:28:55
  Oh yeah.
• 1:28:56
  the unofficial biography of Apple.
• 1:28:59
  Chuck, absolute pleasure, man.
• 1:29:00
  You gave us so much time and so much wisdom, and I really, I just think
• 1:29:05
  your story is a brilliant story and people need to hear it, need
• 1:29:09
  to listen to the templates that are in it because it's the same pattern
• 1:29:13
  that comes up time and time again.
• 1:29:14
  You try and warn, just like Pichot did so many of us about
• 1:29:19
  some of the pitfalls to avoid.
• 1:29:21
  I really highly recommend the book.
• 1:29:22
  It's an easy read, it's a pleasant read full of ups and
• 1:29:26
  downs and full of many insights.
• 1:29:28
  We're gonna do part two when we share some of those insights that Chuck
• 1:29:32
  codified, which are very, very valuable.
• 1:29:34
  Chuck, if anybody wants to reach out and find you, do you want them to, and
• 1:29:38
  if you do, where can they find you?
• 1:29:40
  Lulu Press is the best place to get it.
• 1:29:42
  I need to check and make sure it's still available.
• 1:29:45
  I think it is.
• 1:29:45
  It is, man.
• 1:29:46
  It is.
• 1:29:46
  I actually got mine on Amazon, which is available on Amazon
• 1:29:49
  as well, but it is on Lulu.
• 1:29:50
  author of Permission denied Odyssey of an Intrapreneur, Chuck House.
• 1:29:56
  Thank you for joining us,
• 1:29:57
  you, take care!
• 1:29:58
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