In 1985, Hewlett-Packard Company Limited, a high-tech joint venture between the United States and China, was formally established in Beijing.
More than two decades later, HP has grown from a company with only $10 million in registered capital to a large enterprise with revenues of 22 billion RMB.
In 1912, Packard was born in Pueblo, Colorado, a wealthy family of lawyers, but from a young age, he was not interested in those cumbersome legal provisions, and he liked to engage in their own small inventions, small creations.
Even an injury to his thumb for this did not stop his interest.
In 1930, Packard enrolled in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the prestigious Stanford University, and began his career in this famous electronics mecca.
Stanford is the mother of Silicon Valley, where many intellectual heroes have been born.
It was here that Packard met Fred Trotman, the famous "Father of Silicon Valley", and his best entrepreneurial partner Bill Hewlett.
At the time, the electronics industry was still a nascent industry, but after the visionary Terman became Vice Chancellor as a professor of electrical engineering, he resolved to set aside 579 acres of the university's land to create a high-tech "Stanford Research District" centered in Palo Alto, Santa Clara, near San Francisco.
It takes guts to be the first to start a business in the traditional "ivory tower" of a university.
Trotman first thought of two of his students, Bill Hewlett and David Packard.
At the time, Hewlett and Packard were very good friends, and they often exchanged ideas and argued about issues at the forefront of academia.
Terman had supervised their papers and found that they had many new ideas, which is why they were the first to think of them.
Encouraged by this reformer, Hewlett and Packard drew up a plan together to start their own business after graduation.
But just as they were about to start their own business, the Great Depression loomed over the entire U.S. economy, and their dream had to be put on hold.
After graduation, Packard was employed by General Electric, while Hewlett continued his education.
But things did not stop there, Packard's heart has always been the dream of entrepreneurship, he more than once recalled the words of Professor Trotman at the graduation ceremony: "As you can see, most successful radio companies are built by people with little education.
For those who have a solid theoretical foundation in this area, the chances of success are even greater, and boys, you have a great deal to offer in industry.
"He's been waiting for his chance.
The opportunity came quickly. As the US economy recovered, many companies began purchasing electronic equipment for upgrades, and at this point in time, there were many vacancies in the market waiting to be filled by aspiring young people.
And more importantly, Hewlett has graduated, the two good friends reunited, a few all-night long talk, they decided to realize their dream of entrepreneurship.
Hewlett and Packard found Professor Terman, and with his support, Hewlett and Packard began to put their entrepreneurial plans into action.
The two rented an apartment at 367 Andelin Street in Palo Alto and started the first steps of their business by opening a workshop in a car garage near the apartment.
At the time, the two had only $538 in working capital, and all their "fixed assets" were a workbench, a drill press, a screwdriver, a soldering iron, a hacksaw, and a few purchased electronic parts.
On New Year's Day 1939, the two men formally signed the partnership agreement, flipping a coin to decide whose name would go first.
Hewlett got lucky, and the partnership was registered as Hewlett-Packard, or HP for short, from the first letter of Hewllet-Packard, but better known around the world by its acronym, "H". But the world is more familiar with the acronym - "HP" - which has come to symbolize the success of the company.
Growing from Failure and Setbacks But things didn't always go as planned. After the company was founded, Hewlett continued to develop a new product for his master's thesis, and Packard took on small jobs to keep the company afloat, but it was so precarious that they sometimes wondered how much longer they could support it.
At this point, Prof. Terman reached out to them, and he used his reputation in the community to advocate for them.
This allowed HP to survive.
Finally, Hewlett produced his new invention - a vibrator, applicable to a much wider range of conditions than similar products available at the time, and the price is only 1 / 10 of the price of similar products, Packard quickly applied for a patent for this product, experts in the field of this product has given a very high evaluation, and the These affirmations from the authorities greatly encouraged them to fight.
Packard named the product the 300A, and in order to get the product recognized by the experts in the marketplace, Hewlett-Packard advertised it in a major electronics business magazine, and the orders started pouring in, the profits increased rapidly, and the company's situation changed dramatically.
To publicize the 300A, Packard attended a formal audio oscillator show in Southern California.
At the show, he met Harkins, a sound engineer at Disney Studios, who was preparing a sound track for a movie called Fantasyland, and happened to need a special sound effect - the sound of a bee flying off the screen, then circling the theater, and then coming back on the screen.
But that's where the 300A came in, and Packard was keenly aware that a partnership with Disney would not only dramatically increase the company's visibility, but also generate significant long-term revenue.
He immediately introduced Harkins to HP's Audio Oscillator, and they ended up selling eight units at once, with one reportedly still in use in Hollywood.
And so, HP stood on its feet in its first year of business, with $5,369 in sales and a profit of $1,563.
With that first shot, Packard was even more energized, and by the outbreak of the war in the Pacific in 1941, Hewlett-Packard had 17 employees and was a $100,000-a-year company.
And the outbreak of the Pacific War brought a new opportunity and growth to HP. In June 1942, Hewlett was drafted into the army, and had extensive contacts and influence in the military community, which provided a good foundation for HP's impressive post-war performance in the production of military supplies.
After Hewlett left, Packard began to take charge of the situation, he realized that HP, as a producer of electronic products, in the radio, radar, sonar, and marine, aviation instrumentation and other products in the demand for the surge in the situation occupies an advantageous position; and the harsh conditions of the war happened to be a test of the performance of these products is a good time, which is very important for the development of the company's post-war.
Packard was determined to capitalize on this historic opportunity to make HP really take off.
So he made careful improvements to many of his products to make them more responsive to the needs of the war effort.
And these products soon found their way into the military.
By the end of World War II, Hewlett-Packard had grown into a large company with $2 million in assets and 200 employees.
In 1945, when Hewlett was demobilized from the army, he found himself vice president of this large, multi-million dollar company.
By that time, Hewlett-Packard had built its own Redwood building, which Packard told him could be converted into a grocery store if the electronics industry faltered in the future.
However, the crisis of converting to a grocery store did not come, and instead, HP grew at a high rate.
On August 18, 1947, Hewlett-Packard Co. was officially founded.
In the face of HP's miraculous rise, Professor Terman, who had given them a lot of selfless help, was very happy, and he said to each entrepreneur: "With HP leading the way, you will be the second and third HP.
"In this spirit of the call, in 1955, there are seven companies to Silicon Valley to set up factories, increased to 32 in 1960, to the 1965 Stanford Research Park was formally established, where there has been a concentration of nearly 70 high-tech enterprises, the stars like a cluster of Stanford University; which, Hewlett-Packard leased more than one million square feet of land leased by Hewlett-Packard.
In the late 1970s, Hewlett and Packard also jointly donated a modern "Terman Building" to Stanford University in honor of their mentor.
The garage where they started their business was officially named the "Birthplace of Silicon Valley" by the State of California *** in 1989, making it an invaluable U.S. historical artifact.
In 1959, when Hewlett-Packard was growing under Packard's leadership, he noticed that the company's employees did not seem to be very enthusiastic, and at this time Hewlett-Packard's stock was rising, so what were they unhappy about? After careful investigation, Packard understood, only let the staff hold company stock, in order to fully mobilize their enthusiasm.
This is later popular in the United States of America's employee stock ownership program, employees as the owner of the company, immediately make the company a new look.
Once again, Packard became a national celebrity.
At this point, Hewlett-Packard entered a period of rapid expansion.
In Hewlett and Packard's planning, it not only insisted on technological innovation, the development of new products, but also a series of acquisitions, the company's tentacles quickly into the field of electronic equipment in many areas, from the plotter, electronic medical equipment to analytical instruments, and in 1989, even the early domination of the workstation computer - Apollo Computer, Inc. Apollo computer company also became HP's "in the bag"; but HP's greatest contribution to the field of personal computing tools is the first to develop a scientific calculator.
Arthur C. Clarke, the famous American science fiction writer, wrote a science fiction novel called "Traveling in Space in 2001".
One day, he fantasized about what kind of computing tools would be used by computer engineers in the future and drew a sketch.
On Christmas Eve, 1968, he was told that Hewlett-Packard was selling an HP9100A desktop calculator.
Clark immediately ponied up the money to buy one, and was surprised to find that the HP9100A calculator actually looked like the sketch he had drawn.
It was this sequence of advances and innovations that kept HP ahead of the curve, and it continues to do so today.
The HP Way In Silicon Valley, due to the high profits and risks unique to high-tech companies, today's glory is likely to be tomorrow's flowers, a new product stagnation, will make a large company to close down, where people can not see the tomorrow, "money-driven" concept is practiced by many companies, the companies are not the same as each other. The Silicon Valley has become a battleground for high tech workers.
But Packard took a completely different approach to management, one that included providing the most comprehensive benefits program possible, as well as full trust in its employees.
This approach has come to be known as the "Hewlett-Packard way" or the "HP Way".
Because Packard realized that the most important thing about a business is not the technology, but the people, and that the quality of an employee's work has a direct impact on the company's reputation.
So Hewlett-Packard gave employees almost perfect job security.
It never fired any employees again into the 1950s.
When the U.S. economic crisis reached *** in 1974, everyone in Silicon Valley was at risk, and a large number of tech workers became unemployed.
At HP, it was business as usual.
In stark contrast to other companies.
At HP, there was a joke that the only way to get fired from a company was to kill your boss.
Sometimes other companies in Silicon Valley adopt some of HP's practices, but only in a superficial way, without really learning the essence of HP's management approach: absolute trust and respect for every employee.
Just a few bread-and-butter movie-watching favors will go up in smoke again when the big crisis hits.
The HP Way has five core values, which are like five conjoined twins.
Every Hewlett-Packard person on the five core values backwards: (a) believe, respect for individuals, respect for employees; (b) the pursuit of the highest level of achievement, the pursuit of the best; (c) to do things must be very upright, can not cheat the user, can not deceive the staff, can not do unethical things; (d) the success of the company is dependent on the strength of everyone to complete, and not rely on the strength of a particular individual to complete; (v) Believe in continuous innovation and do things with a certain degree of flexibility.