惠普CTO退休，再谈创新和WebOS

2011年8月18日，这一天，是惠普(HP)这块金字招牌蒙尘之日。对Phil McKinney来说，这一天，他重新思考自己的未来，决定卸下惠普PC部门首席技术长的职位，转而成为一位创新专家(innovation guru)。 今年8月，当时的惠普CEO 李艾科 (Leo Apotheker)做出的策略宣示，就如同珍珠港事变中从天而降的大型炸 弹一般，震憾了整个业界。他扼杀了HP的WebOS智能手机和平板电脑业务，并表示考虑拆分PC部门。但一周后，Apotheker就卷铺盖走路了。 在稍早前的季度公司电话会议中，HP现任CEO Meg Whitman提到了8月18日。“当时一些人认我们们可能就此离开硬件领域了，”她表示，李艾科的决策造成了这些混乱。 Whitman出掌HP的这段时间内，她做出了终止拆分PC部门、增加10%研发投资等决定，誓言让这家公司重回轨道。Whitman也表示，要到12月初WebOS的真正命运才会决定。

Phil McKinney

对McKinney来说，这阵子的骚动，只不过让他回归到一个全职顾问的角色，并有时间写了一本新书《超越平庸》(直译，Beyond the Obvious)，该书预计明年2月发表。 自李艾科宣布决策后，我认为，现在是思考下一步该做什么的最佳时机了，McKinney稍早前在他位于旧金山的住家办公室表示。 McKinney于8月22日在他的部落格上所发布的文章中含蓄地谈到了惠普当时的情况。他提到了对于创新支持必须更有耐性，这也呼应了推出数周后随即夭折的WebOS团队命运。 然而，任何有关他在这家IT巨擘任职九年的直接评论，恐怕都只能等待今年12月31日他正式离开工作岗位后才能得知了，或许他会在新书中透露。在此同时，他也对Whitman给予了高度评价。Whitman是他任职HP九年中所经历的第四任CEO。 “她说的是对的，现在只剩下执行问题而已，”McKinney赞同Whitman重新分配研发预算的做法。 他也主动给Whitman一些忠告：“要注意文化的力量，文化可能是助力，也可能是阻力。” “文化因素可能在瞬间让你的策略全然失效，”McKinney说。“你可能认为CEO有调动决策的权利，但你不能忽略，在做出任何决策时，文化可能产生的巨大影响力。” “HP 有着令人难以置信的强势固有文化──Bill和Dave甚至就像仍游走于公司大堂之中(Bill Hewlett和Dave Packard于1939年创办惠普)。”这是一个依靠创新而推动的工程组织，所以，无论是突然中止项目或减少预算，当你削减对创新的投入时，很快这家公 司便会陷入照表操课，而且对所有行政高层形成抗拒之力，他表示。 换句话说，在经历Carly Fiorina、Mark Hurd和李艾科之后，HP善良的员工们承受了四次痛苦，因而导致这段日子以来他们极度的不确定感。 本文下一页：WebOS还有未来吗？ 本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载

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{pagination} 作为一位创新大师，McKinney认为，创新是来自于学习与实践。 “有人说这就像黑色艺术，一些人会幸运拥有，但另一些人则不，”他说。“我的看法是，这是一种人人都可以学习的技巧，创新并不是神赐予的礼物，所以你可以去学习和实践它。” 关键问题是让你的想法挣脱束缚，这便是创新的核心价值，McKinney说。 我们都被钉死在教条下，我们在学校便受到教导，行事要遵守规范，他说。“而最要紧的，是一旦你无法直接回答，你就必须暂停，并发挥探索家的精神来寻找更新和更有趣的机会，”他表示。 这段时间以来，所有关于创新的讨论都己超越了最新的商务时尚范畴，这代表着根本上的转变，McKinney说。例如，一般在估算市场价值时，很大程度上是以工厂和机器等有形资产为基础，但现在，专利等无形资产也成为评估企业价值的关键，而且许多企业的有形资产也逐渐减少。 “Google和Apple这类拥有激活下一波创新能力的公司，往往获得更高的市场期待，”McKinney说。 “当企业高层们看这些股价变化时，他们便会改变他们在雇用员工时的价值观，因此，人们对自己的事业和职涯的思考也会产生巨大转变，”他说。 在 即将迈入生涯下一阶段之际，McKinney谈到了HP WebOS设备，他希望这个行动操作系统能找到适合的家。市场传说亚马逊(Amazon)或许有意买下WebOS用在未来的Kindle中，或者，中国的 百度(Baidu)也可以用它来打造类似Google Android的系统。 McKinney表示，自他申请退休后，他就未曾参与这些决策了。但他也不忘提醒WebOS是首个基于新兴HTML5标准的操作系统。 个人观点，我认为WebOS算是玩完了。它崛起的时间点，恰好遇到市场上有着4~5个热门行动操作系统──Android、iOS、Blackberry和Windows Phone。现在，随着时间一天天过去，WebOS处境愈来愈不利，看起来更像是一个企业孤儿。 我很希望听到你对于WebOS未来去向、创新经济，或是在Whitman掌舵下的HP未来发展的看法。请和我们一起讨论吧！

HP一度打算将WebOS运用在从打印机、PC到智能手机和平板电脑等所有设备中。Exiesmc

编译： Joy Teng 本文授权编译自EE Times，版权所有，谢绝转载 参考英文原文： Retiring HP exec talks innovation, WebOS，by　Rick Merritt

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{pagination} Retiring HP exec talks innovation, WebOS Rick Merritt SAN JOSE, Calif. – August 18 has become a sort of Day That Will Live in Infamy at Hewlett-Packard. For Phil McKinney it was the day he started re-thinking his future, decided to retire as chief technologist of the company's PC group and resumed his career as an innovation guru. It was no Pearl Harbor, but Leo Apotheker did drop a couple big bombs that day last August. He killed HP's WebOS smartphone and tablet business and said the company would consider splitting off its PC division. Weeks later, Apotheker lost his job as chief executive over the decisions which were widely criticized by observers including yours truly. Meg Whitman mentioned August 18 a handful of times last week in the company's quarterly earnings call, her first as the new CEO. "Some people thought we were getting out of hardware entirely," she said of the confusion Apotheker created. In her short time at the helm so far, Whitman has ended discussions about splitting of the PC unit (it stays), increased R&D spending ten percent and pledged to get the company back on track. Whitman reportedly gave herself until early December to decide what to do with WebOS. For McKinney the brouhaha was a cue to segue back into full time work as a consultant and finish up work on "Beyond the Obvious," his book on innovation due out in February. "With the [Apotheker] announcement and everything going on and the book coming out I decided now is a good time to think about what's the next thing I want to do," said McKinney speaking in his San Jose home office the day before Thanksgiving. Many readers interpreted McKinney's August 22 blog post on seven laws of innovation as his veiled take on what was happening at HP. It talked in part about the need for patience to support innovation in ways that resonanted with the WebOS team that got the axe just weeks after its first product launch. But if there will be any direct comment on his nine years at the IT giant it will come after his tenure officially ends December 31, perhaps in a subsequent book. In the meantime, he's giving guarded praise for Whitman, the fourth HP CEO in nine years. "She is saying the right things, now it's just a matter of execution and walking the talk," McKinney said, citing her moves to rebuild R&D budgets. He also offered Whitman some unsolicited advice: "Be aware of the power of culture; It can be helpful or a roadblock. "Culture eats strategy for lunch," said McKinney. "You may think the CEO makes the calls, but culture has at least as huge an influence as any strategy you come up with," he said. "HP has an incredibly strong culture--Bill and Dave still walk the halls," he said. "It’s a heavily engineering-driven organization fueled on innovation, so when you shortchange innovation whether through suddenly stopping programs people committed to or reducing budgets, it runs very counter to the culture and builds resistance to anything from the executive suite," he added. In other words, in the wake of scandals and missteps around Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd and Leo Apotherker, HP's good people are about four times bitten so ten times skeptical these days. Killer questions, WebOS As an innovation guru, McKinney comes from the pragmatist school. "Some people make it sound like a black art that some people are blessed with and others are not," he said. "My point is it’s a skill anyone can learn, it's not a gift from God, so you can learn it and practice it," he added. Killer questions that make you think out of the box are core tools of innovation, according to McKinney. He created a Twitter feed of such questions and considers his upcoming book the first full compendium of them. "We get stuck in following rules, we get taught it in school, staying in the lines and putting on blinders," he said. "The best killer questions are ones you can't directly answer, you have to pause and do a discovery process to find new and interesting opportunities," he said. All the innovation talk these days is more than the latest business fashion, it’s a shift of the tectonic plates, McKinney said. For example, market valuations used to be based largely on tangible assets like factories and machines, but now it's based on intangibles such as patents and even less quantifiable assets. "Google and Apple have high market caps related to the market's expectations of their ability to innovate the next big thing," McKinney said. "When executives see this sort of change in stock prices, it changes their values in hiring practices, so this is going to have a huge change in how people think about their businesses and careers," he said. As he heads into the next phase of his career, McKinney is taking his HP WebOS devices with him and hoping the mobile operating system finds a good home. Rumors suggest Amazon might want it for future Kindles, or maybe China's Baidu could use it in a play similar to Google's Android. McKinney says he has kept himself out of all such discussions since he submitted his retirement. But he is quick to praise WebOS for being the first mobile OS based on the emerging HTML 5 standard now being widely touted as a point of convergence. Personally, I think its curtains for WebOS. It started life as the fourth or fifth most interesting mobile OS—at best--behind Android, iOS, the Blackberry and Windows Phone. Now it slips further and further down the list with every day as a corporate orphan. I'd love to hear what you think about WebOS, the innovation economy or HP under Whitman. Sound off below. At one time, HP planned to install WebOS on everything from printers and PCs to smartphones and tablets.