People keep asking ... what's the story on this wacko-sounding award. So, here's a brief summary:
From the viewpoint of Dave Packard, founder
The Medal of Defiance was
awarded only once in the history of Hewlett-Packard, by HP's founder , David Packard, to Chuck House in April 1982 when House began a new
role as HP’s Corporate Engineering Director, sitting in an adjoining office to
David Packard, chairman of the board.
Bill Hewlett, Dave’s co-founder, had the adjacent office on the other
side. Packard had become concerned that the “new HP” in the computer
business was becoming very bureaucratic.
.
New CEO John Young thought
it key to shift resources from instrumentation to computing, and to co-ordinate
all of the R&D efforts across ninety divisions into something much more
efficient. But the very appointment of a
Corporate Engineering Director was evidence to Packard that a job to
co-ordinate strategies, streamline development times, and strengthen
productivity rather than emphasize creativity would be viewed as another
“Headquarters” imposition.
House was one of those
mavericks, though, from a remote division who exemplified local
creativity. He had pioneered several
major programs, and helped launch a dozen divisions in his first twenty years
at the company. If anyone could meet
Young’s goals, and persuade the bulk of HP engineers and managers that this was
workable, it augured to be House.
Packard recalled one long-forgotten
incident with House, and he concluded that an award to House at inception of
this new corporate role could set a tone that emphasized innovation and
creativity at EVERY level of the company.
Voilà, the Award of Defiance was conceived, created, and bestowed.
The history, by Chuck House (extracted from “Old Bribery”,
Chapter 2 of Permission Denied: Odyssey
of an Intrapreneur, InnovaScapes Institute Press, 2013)
Given a choice of several new projects, I hadn’t previously seen one that
was on the list, an FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) control
tower monitor. I asked my boss, “What’s
this one?” His cryptic answer: “We don’t
really know. It’s a new request, not
really an oscilloscope. Milt Russell in our cathode ray tube (CRT) department has worked in this area;
he might know something about it.”
The FAA wanted to see images of airplanes near an
airport ― recall movie scenes where a control tower is tracking radar blips on
CRTs (cathode ray tubes, or television tubes) that indicate planes. Our chief
competitor, Tektronix, had voted ‘no,’ giving us an opening. Milt
Russell, a short soft-spoken scientist, had
come from General Electric, the company that built the display
equipment extant at airports. Russell
was touting a new technology: an expansion mesh lens that he believed could
shorten the picture tube length dramatically (from 54 inches to 18 inches).
For this project, however, there was a new requirement: the FAA wanted the CRT to show more than a radar blip. They wanted
identifying flight letters next to each blip, a hard goal with an expansion
mesh approach. The prototype didn’t meet
the FAA needs since it defocused the letters that
identified the planes. Russell fiddled with the focusing problem; I sought
applications where focus wasn’t so important.
We probably should have gone back to our bosses and said, “Hey, this
won’t work for the FAA requirement. We
should call FAA and say ‘we’re sorry’ and then cancel the project.”
The prototype was pretty intriguing.
Essentially it was a very high-speed television set. The diagonal screen size was impressive for a
‘scope, 14 inches instead of 5 ― an 800 per cent larger display. The joke was that we were building a much
faster TV set so that you could watch the movie Gandhi in four minutes.
Other wags opined that it was a ‘scope for nearsighted long-armed
engineers.
By the time that our bosses figured out that we couldn’t solve the FAA problem, I loved the pictures we could
display. Wanting to take the unit to
some potential customers, I was strongly told ‘No.’ HP did not allow engineers
to go alone to customers (a sales representative had to go); second, we
couldn’t afford the extra travel expense; and third, HP didn’t allow prototypes
to be shown to customers because that might tip our hand.
I proposed to take the box with me on a personal trip to California for
the upcoming Christmas holidays, calling on customers where HP sales people set
up the meeting. This met two of the
three objections ― the contacts and the travel cost. For the third point, I argued that if we were
going to cancel the project for lack of market, there was no real danger in
‘tipping our hand to competitors’. They grudgingly
acquiesced.
The box, though, was too big to put in my car. I had to package the unit ― in an eight cubic
foot box, two feet on every side ― take it to the airport, and fly it from
place to place. At each stop, I’d put my
family in a motel, take the right front seat out of my vintage Volkswagen
Beetle, go to the airport, get the box, bring it to the motel, unpack it, and
then go to the customer.
I met with twenty potential customers in two weeks. It generated phenomenal excitement. Sadly,
the findings weren’t persuasive back home.
At the annual division review, Packard asked us about the technology, and later, about
the market. The executives punted,
saying they’d found few potential customers.
I wasn’t asked ― I was ‘just’ a designer, sans experience with marketing.
In a stentorian voice, Packard said: “When I come back next year, I
don’t want to see this project in the lab.”
Told this verdict the next day, I was quite upset. Our marketing manager, a talented, energetic
voluble man, had said the sales forecast was thirty-one units, a number that
enraged me. I countered, saying that
he’d missed by six percent, since he had not called my father, who wanted two
units.
I argued for the applications; my R&D boss was courageous, granting
an extra $60,000 for eight months to get to production. When Packard returned a year later and saw it, he nearly
had a stroke ― pounding the table, he bellowed : “I thought I said to kill this
damn thing.”
I witlessly said, “No, sir. You
said when you came back, you didn’t want to see this in the lab. It isn’t.
It’s in production.”
The answer didn’t satisfy.
Results: Most paradigm shifts start
slowly. Three months after sales
release, we had sold forty units, a pleasing if not rousing launch. The new applications for this display box
were compelling. It became the first
commercially available computer graphics CRT.
Beyond Alan Kay’s ‘personal computer’, Doug
Engelbart bought one to experiment in the first
demonstrated computer network in the famous “Mother of All Demos”. It won a Hollywood Oscar for technical screen graphics, it was
the surgery room display for Dr. Norman DeBakey’s first artificial heart transplant,
and it was the basis for the TV space video of Neil Armstrong’s foot landing on the moon July 20,
1969.
These high-visibility successes were in the future – for the
moment all we had were a few sales and a peeved CEO.
What did
I learn? Bring
passion and dedication to your job, and never quit in the face of adversity. Be willing to challenge ‘the rules’ – nothing
good happens unless something happens first.
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