The individual works, partly to make money, of course, but we should also realize that the individual who is doing a worthwhile job is working because he feels he is accomplishing something worthwhile. This is important in your association with these individuals. You know that those people you work with that are working only for money are not making any real contribution.
I want to emphasize then that people work to make a contribution and they do this best when they have a real objective when they know what they are trying to achieve and are able to use their own capabilities to the greatest extent. This is a basic philosophy which we have discussed before— Management by Objective as compared to Management by Control. In other words when we discuss supervision and management we are not talking about a military type organization where the man at the top issues an order and it is passed on down the line until the man at the bottom does as he is told without question or reason.
That is precisely the type of organization we do not want. We feel our objectives can best be achieved by people who understand what they are trying to do and can utilize their own capabilities to do them. I have noticed when we promote people from a routine job to a supervisory position, there is a tremendous likelihood that these people will get carried away by the authority.
They figure that all they have to do now is tell everyone else what to do and quite often this attitude causes trouble. We must realize that supervision is not a job of giving orders; it is a job of providing the opportunity for people to use their capabilities efficiently and effectively. I mean that what you are trying to get is something else.
One of the underlying requirements of this sort of approach is that we do understand a little more specifically what the objectives of the company are. These then have to be translated into the objectives of the departments and groups and so on down. While Steve Jobs famously said that focus is the ability to say no, Packard approached focus from another angle :.
The other objective which is complementary to this and equally important is to try to make everything we do worthwhile. We want to do our best when we take on a job.
In engineering, there are two basic criteria that are uppermost in the definition of what we hope to be able to do. As we develop these new instruments, we hope they will be creative in their design, and they will provide better ways of doing a job. There are many examples of this— the instruments our engineers have developed this last year give us some good examples.
The clip-on milliammeter, the new wave analyzer, the sampling scope— all are really creative designs. They give people who buy them methods of making measurements they could not make before those instruments were available.
However, creative design alone is not enough and never will be. In order to make these into useful devices, there must be meticulous attention to detail. The engineers understand this. Panache Tech and Gadgets. Panache People City Life. ET Magazine. Vinod Mahanta. Rate Story. Font Size Abc Small. Abc Medium. Abc Large. ET Bureau. She has taken over at a point when the company is facing an identity crisis. Soon after, Apotheker was ousted after 11 months at the helm by the board, which elected Whitman to lead the company beset by scandals, boardroom skullduggery and strategy flip-flops.
ETPrime stories of the day Investing Bad bet or value buy? Logistics There is a base, Gati hasn't destroyed itself. Subscribe to ETPrime. Browse Companies:. Find this comment offensive? As their sales growth has tapered off, the companies have also seen activists demand better shareholder returns, pushing executives to choose focus over sprawl.
This is a mechanism for each company to focus more attention on the core business. The connections between Hewlett-Packard and EBay extend into the executive suite and boardroom. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is a director at both companies. Whitman and Donahoe got to know each other as consultants at Bain, which Whitman joined in and which Donahoe joined a year or so later. Whitman also worked at Walt Disney Co. By the end of last decade, Hewlett-Packard and EBay were beginning to show similar trajectories.
Its sales have declined the past two fiscal years. Activist investors soon began sniffing around the businesses. EBay has also had to deal with activists. The company fended off investor Carl Icahn earlier this year over his calls to spin off PayPal.
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