Word: hurd
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...Hurd quickly stopped work on product lines like televisions where HP wasn't already either No. 1 or No. 2. Next he consolidated the data centers from which HP conducted its operations, going from 85 to six. Once the financial crisis hit, Hurd slashed salaries across the board, including his own by 20%. "In an environment like this, there's no margin for error and no tolerance for inaction," Hurd wrote in a staff memo last year...
Meanwhile, Hurd has turned strategist. His goal? To integrate HP's operations so fully that its customers could fulfill all their printing, computing, connectivity and tech-service needs in one stop. HP has beefed up its 20,000-strong sales force and targeted its attention on the top 2,000 firms worldwide. The company has just launched a $40 million rebranding campaign, complete with a new tagline: "Let's Do Amazing." "We're entering an era where the primary thing is going to be services," says HP strategy chief Shane Robison. "And we want to be there to provide...
...other companies were scaling back in the past two years, HP was on the hunt for bargains. Hurd found his first in August 2008, when HP spent $13.9 billion to buy the languishing infotech-consulting giant Electronic Data Systems (EDS), a direct play against high-end-services leader IBM. Then last November, HP announced it would pay $2.7 billion for networking concern 3Com, a means to rile Cisco as well as expand HP's footprint in the rapidly growing China market, where 3Com is strong. About 70% of HP's business is overseas...
...home, Hurd has had to reconcile his drive for efficiency with HP's legacy of letting the geeks in R&D roam freely. Innovation, after all, is what tech companies do. And critics note that HP's $17 billion in overall R&D investment since 2004 has dwindled as a percentage of its growing sales...
...take on this balancing act, Hurd hired research director and former academic Prith Banerjee in 2007. Banerjee undertook a full-scale overhaul of HP Labs, a longtime oasis for HP tinkerers and their outlandish ideas. To his astonishment, Banerjee found his new researchers sprawled across as many as 150 ongoing projects...