Rules of the Garage  (Jul 4, 2024)

By 1999, the HP principles that had worked for decades – such as "...job security based on performance..." and "...share in the success that they make possible" – were no longer applicable.

Instead of redeploying people to invent new products and develop new markets, there were continual layoffs. Company-wide profit sharing, which rewarded cross-organizational teamwork, was eliminated.

The HP Way and Corporate Objectives were replaced by the "Rules of the Garage" – developed by an ad agency in 1999 and used in a $200 million worldwide advertising campaign.

The ads, which starred CEO Carly Fiorina, were shown on network TV, including the Super Bowl in January, 2000. They didn't mention any HP products – and must have mystified the vast majority of the audience.

(Bill and Dave had always opposed buying the Garage. Under Carly Fiorina, HP purchased the property in October 2000.)

The 1999-2000 ad campaign.

Carly Fiorina was named CEO in July 1999.

"...a $200 million global brand initiative... The new image turns on the company's legacy of invention, and the vision of founders David Packard and William Hewlett, who conceived HP in a garage... The spots will air heavily in network TV programming... They also will air on the pregame portion of Super Bowl XXXIV [Jan 30, 2000] on ABC"

--Tobi Elkin Advertising Age, November 1999

"Fiorina quickly identified her rallying point: the original Palo Alto garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard founded the company in 1939... She engaged a local ad agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, to reposition HP to the world. Goodby creative manager Steven Simpson sat down with Packard’s autobiography, The HP Way, and, working from the text, produced a manifesto that he called 'Rules of the Garage' ...

"Fiorina loved the concept. But she and Susan Bowick, HP’s head of human resources, decided the draft rules didn’t capture the company’s current direction. Soon the allusions to next-bench engineers and topflight performance had disappeared..."

"More rejiggering lay ahead. Goodby and HP executives wanted to showcase the garage in HP’s new television commercials, but Packard’s old house had changed hands multiple times, and the shed in back was being leased for $100 a month by a florist. So the ad team picked out a back corner of HP’s corporate campus and built an ersatz garage. The lawn in front of the building was made to look like a rutted driveway. Sport-utility vehicles rumbled back and forth until they wore down a 100-foot stretch of grass.

"Ad-agency camera crews arrived and ultimately produced a dazzling commercial with Fiorina herself telling people, 'The company of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard is being reinvented. The original startup will act like one again. Watch!' "

--George Anders "The Carly Chronicles. An Inside Look at Her Campaign to Reinvent HP." Free on Internet Archive    Fast Company, January 2003 [subscription required]  

1. Believe you can change the world.
2. Work quickly, keep the tools unlocked, work whenever.
3. Know when to work alone and when to work together.
4. Share – tools, ideas. Trust your colleagues.
5. No Politics. No bureaucracy. (These are ridiculous in a garage.)
6. The customer defines a job well done.
7. Radical ideas are not bad ideas.
8. Invent different ways of working.
9. Make a contribution every day. If it doesn’t contribute, it doesn’t leave the garage.
10. Believe that together we can do anything.
11. Invent.

--1999 HP ad displayed in Wired

Travelling Garage TV ad with creative and production credits.

Original Radicals TV ad with creative and production credits.

After a string of disappointing earnings reports, the board asked Fiorina to resign in Feb 2005. She ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate in 2010 and for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016.

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