Outgoing HP Business School

"Every day needs to make a difference, otherwise a garage will always be a garage." This is a sentence from HP's famous Garage Law, a concrete manifestation of the values of HP's two founders, who later The Hewlett-Packard Way, formed on the basis of the Garage Law, has become the soul of Hewlett-Packard's nearly 70-year history of development, and a management book that the business world is eager to learn.

As early as 1999, many Chinese companies were very interested in learning the way of HP. This demand also led to the establishment of HP Business School in 2001. HP did not regard its own ideas and practices as secrets. It is not a secret, but generously and sincerely brings out the best management practices within itself, and brings out the experience of cultivating managers, and shares it with Chinese enterprises. Some of these companies are HP customers, and some are not.

HP Business School's training resources are shared with HP's internal HR department. That is to say, HP Business School's method of training managers is actually some valuable experience in HP's own internal training of managers. Yue Hao, China Manager of HP Training Services Division, told us. "The curriculum system and teacher resources behind us, including course management, are basically a system. But we train external customers, and the human resources department trains our internal staff."

In terms of operations, HP Business School is very The great thing is that it is a self-financing business unit. The training division it belongs to exists as a profit center. Since its inception, the development of HP Business School has been very healthy. Market-oriented operation has forced business schools to carefully study customer needs and provide valuable products and services, which has become one of the important strategies for HP China to transform into services. It can be said that the reason and operation mode of HP Business School are unique in the world.

Lecturers: Senior managers teach in person

The lecturers are all HP executives, or managers who have worked as executives at HP, which is a unique feature of HP Business School.

Lecturing for the business school has a firm place in the current president's schedule. The president, who has returned to HP, takes a class at the business school about every six months. Business strategy and execution are his strengths. When he shared with business school clients, many times the client's bosses came over to listen.

"We have many good managers, good executives, and they are all good teachers." Yue Hao is very proud of this point, "They are all brought out by the team, and they are also cultivated by HP. Yes. They give lectures with some practical colors and personal experience. The content is very vivid, and they have more common language with the students." attractive. Their ideas, wisdom and management methods have all gone through the experience of management practice, which is unmatched by academic teachers.

Chen Sheng has worked at HP for 12 years and is now the China Business Director of HP Global Software Service Center. He has lectured for the business school for two or three years. He has previously held various positions such as regional general manager and general manager of business departments in different places such as Northeast China, Dalian, Shanghai, and Chongqing, and has very rich experience. "What attracts students the most is that I have a lot of stories," Chen Sheng said with a smile, "I didn't tell him what was written in the book, but told him what problems I encountered and how HP handled it. He took back a lot of things. It can be used."

"For a small example, I often ask everyone in class what behavioral characteristics and qualities do you think a good manager should have. From HP's perspective, we believe that a good manager should have three main behaviors , the first is people-oriented, the second is to grasp the direction, and the third is to implement the plan. These three aspects are indispensable.

"Then I share an example. I once met a sales manager who knew the industry well, and formulated the plan. The strategy and direction are very effective, and the management team is very strict, everything is executed according to plan, and the results are also good. Judging from the numbers, it's really good, but the morale of the staff and the evaluation of him are very low, and the turnover rate of the staff is very high. His biggest problem is that he doesn't give employees any space, and at the same time he is too strict, making employees think that he has a value problem. What is this manager missing? people oriented.

"I've also met a technical manager who is solid, nice to people and willing to share his experience with his staff, who still feels dissatisfied and has a high turnover rate because everyone I feel that there is no direction, and everyone thinks that I am in this team, what is my personal development?"

Because such examples are all seen and experienced by Chen Sheng himself, they often occur in the process of business operation , when he shared it with everyone, it was easy to resonate with the students. "When everyone goes back, they will think, as a manager, what is missing." Chen Sheng said.

Actually, at HP Business School, every teacher is a "person with a story", and the story comes from HP's nearly 70-year development history and their management experience at HP for at least 5 years or even more than a dozen years. Zhang Jian has worked for HP for 11 years, and has worked in all three HP groups. He has served as general manager of the government business department and regional general manager. Before giving lectures at HP Business School, he had been a sales training teacher in the company. At one point, 60 to 70 percent of the sales staff in the company had taken his class.

These experiences made him particularly persuasive in front of his students. One time he went to see a civil aviation customer, and the other party was very interested in channel management. For Zhang Jian, channel management is daily work. When he talked about how HP did it, the other party immediately said, then you come to us. Speak.

Zhang Jian is one of the earliest lecturers at HP Business School. He has been lecturing since HP Business School was established in 2001. He left Hewlett-Packard in 2006, but he did not leave the business school. He has been teaching classic courses such as "Management Process" to the students of the business school. When he was interviewed, he had just returned to Beijing from Shenzhen CIMC.

When talking about why he still came to the business school to give lectures, Zhang Jian revealed an unbreakable HP complex, saying that he "dedicated the best time to HP, but also learned a lot from HP". Now he is the general manager of Shenzhen Longtu Software Co., Ltd. He said that many management methods of the company are learned from HP. For example, he uses his office as a conference room and sits in the same workstation as the employees. He bought books from Dangdang.com and gave them to employees' children on Children's Day. Many of these humanized management methods came from HP's subtle influence. In addition, students are very welcome to his class, and some students are single-minded and wait for his time.

For HP's current managers, there is no extra lecture fee for them to teach at the business school, and they are willing to dedicate their valuable time and experience to the business school. One reason is that HP has always had a tradition of managers leading teams And culture, they were cultivated by HP, and they also cultivated their own team at HP, and the cultivation of talents has been integrated into their habits. Another important reason is that lectures are also a great way to learn.

For example, no matter which company Zhang Jian teaches, he must put the company's stuff in the course. For him, lecturing is a process of continuous learning and absorption while giving. The communication with the students has also brought him a lot. Now he often uses a short video when he talks about his vision, which was given to him by one of his students from China Mobile.

Chen Sheng also has a deep understanding of this. "Lectures will force you not to be lazy, to reflect on yourself, and to summarize your experience. Many things used to be unconscious, but now they are conscious. It's clear, I've figured it out now. Moreover, when I communicate with students from different industries, I will find that many things are natural and logical in HP, but in many enterprises, this is not the case. What you think is the most basic, he may be very Valuable, you think the most valuable, but they think there is a distance, this also has a deeper understanding of the Chinese market, and is a good opportunity to enhance their life experience."

After all, HP executives are their own jobs. The work is also very busy. In order to ensure that their work and teaching will not be affected, Yue Hao has also given full consideration to the system. "HP's current managers, we generally control them to give lectures 2-4 times a year, three days each time." Yue Hao said, "I don't want too few, because less than two times is not enough to maintain his teaching level. Knives will rust if they are not sharpened. But we don't want them to talk too much. Four times a year is our approximate upper limit, that is, once a quarter, 3 days each time. We think this amount will still affect their work. Smaller."

Students: mainly middle and senior managers

Since its establishment, HP Business School has been positioned at the middle and high end, providing training for middle and senior managers, among which middle managers are the main courses of the business school. object.

Yue Hao said: "This has something to do with the practice in the enterprise. Now many enterprises and companies have a strategy. The executives have a very clear direction, but the strategy cannot be implemented. From the middle to the front line, it gradually declines, and the biggest decline occurs in the middle managers; sometimes it is difficult to promote a change, and there will be an obvious attenuation of information."

Therefore, there are more courses in HP Business School now. , are designed for middle managers. For example, "Management Process", "Strategic Human Resource Management", "Ten Steps of Strategic Planning", "HP Execution", etc. These courses teach them how to lead the team and how to further analyze and decompose the company strategy at the department level. How to improve the execution of your team, how to let each department complete its mission by creating a good organizational environment, etc.

Yue Hao introduced that, for example, in terms of the executive power course, from HP's basic point of view, there are several factors to improve executive power. The most important one is the quality of managers themselves, and the second is management It is necessary to build a good organizational environment, and finally, to manage the entire team in a performance-oriented way. This is the big frame. Very operational points are covered throughout the course that middle managers can use immediately when they return to work.

HP Business School's training program for senior managers is more strategic, but not theoretical. Combined with HP's executive training experience, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has jointly launched some executive training programs with action-based learning. Partners of the HP Business School include Stanford University and the Economic Research Center of Peking University. In the course for executives, we may talk about the operation of multinational companies, how to do globalization, how to innovate in high-tech companies, and the relationship between intellectual property management and corporate strategy in this era. These topics aren't your typical MBA curriculum, but they are indeed new issues that companies face in today's global competitive environment.

Another aspect of executive training is action learning. For example, if you go back to the Long March, you can understand the arrangements in the military at that time, and then reflect on the concepts you can learn in management. More action-based learning is directly connected to real-world problems in the business. Yue Hao said: "For example, we will invite a certain customer to the United States, and we will invite 4 to 5 senior executives of well-known American companies in the same industry. We will have a roundtable discussion, and we will discuss together what are the common problems faced by our industry. This How to solve the problem in the United States, please give some feedback from each American business executive. Such a project may take 5 to 8 days."

And this year, HP Business School also added training for new managers. This also represents another feature of HP Business School, that is, the curriculum system keeps pace with the times and is closely integrated with practice.

Course: Closely integrated with practice

The first program of HP Business School when it was just established was called "The HP Way MBA", which lasted 6 days and only had 5 courses, but now it has formed three series of 40 Multiple courses.

The series of "HP Management" courses currently offered by Hewlett-Packard Business School are the essence and summary of HP's management methodology. The skills-enhancing “HP Ways of Selling” and “HP Ways of Service” also include 19 key courses. "Practical" is the most distinctive feature of all courses.

In the gradually developed curriculum system of Hewlett-Packard School of Business, the emergence of each course in each program is closely related to the management problems faced by Chinese enterprises and the actual management challenges faced by Chinese managers. "In each period, the focus required by the market is different. We appropriately add some modules to the original core courses to continuously correspond to the market environment that keeps pace with the times." Yue Hao said. Of course, these management measures are also constantly practiced in HP's annual growth.

Hewlett-Packard Business School has a classic course "Management Process", which is also a required course for HP's own managers. The production of this course is also very interesting. Hewlett-Packard Co., in conjunction with Stanford University, conducted a survey and research on 173 successful internal managers, summed up their management methods and leadership behaviors, and how they led the team to achieve performance goals. After the results came out, the researchers were surprised to find that the methods used in the management process of the successful managers surveyed were very similar. After summarizing their common behavioral characteristics, they extracted an efficient management process consisting of five core steps. This course comes from practice and is highly maneuverable, making it easy for people to grasp the key points.

This class has been popular for over a decade, but HP is currently working on a revamp of it. Yue Hao explained: "Because the current environment has changed, the national economic situation is under increasing pressure, and many companies are facing cost problems, insufficient resources, etc. What to do in this situation. We will combine HP's practice in the past year or two. Make some revisions."

The new courses for new managers launched by HP Business School this year are increased in the context of the rapid development of Chinese enterprises and the emergence of a large number of new managers. In the process of contacting customers, the business school found that some companies, especially in the past two years, have developed very fast, and their entire assets and market share have greatly increased, which corresponds to the rapid expansion of personnel, requiring a lot of front-line managers and Grassroots cadres, so a large number of talents who were originally experts have been promoted to talents who lead the team, but they may still lack some corresponding skills. How to be a successful new manager becomes a universal question with practical significance.

HP has its own set of training courses for new managers, "We took HP's practice and turned it into a 4-day course." Yue Hao said, "We believe that new managers must have four skills, such as Talk about how to set goals and break down goals; how to comment on a business and see if a business is doing well or not, because many things are not done by the manager himself, you need to talk to the employees to know whether the work is done well or not; for example, how Coaching employees, teaching some things one-on-one; and how to report to leaders effectively and clearly after having a set of business ideas. These are very practical things.” These four disciplines The materials in the course are all materials used by HP to train new managers, and they are also things that customers generally report that new managers are lacking. This course was very popular as soon as it was launched.

HP Business School also has some unique programs. For example, in some large projects, there will be a master forum. According to the customer's situation, economists and management masters will be invited to give speeches, and the speakers will be based on the needs of customers. Laiding said, "Some customers are more concerned about macro policies, so we will invite professors from the Party School to speak." Guests participating in these projects come from all walks of life, not limited to business people. For example, a few years ago, Hewlett Packard Business School once invited Li Yongbo, the head coach of the national badminton team, to give advice and encouragement, and Taiwanese actor Yang Huishan to tell the story. How to transform from a Golden Horse Award actress to do business, and so on.

Effect: Formation of management habits

"The purpose of training, especially management training, must be through courses or training programs to allow managers to form certain management habits." Yue Hao emphasized. The courses of Hewlett-Packard Business School are highly operable, and students can directly apply what they have learned to their actual work after the training, which truly plays a role in improving work methods and management quality through training. In order to promote the application of students, HP Business School will arrange many cases and group discussions in the course, which will allow students to practice repeatedly. Repeated practice is an important and effective way to form management habits.

For example, when describing how to do strategic planning, the environment of the business unit where the trainee is located will be shown. For example, how to plan when a new product is launched. The trainee must practice the method taught in the class. When it's not over, the teacher will tell the students where they are doing well and where they are not doing well, and the students will do it a second time. "You must form a management habit. If you don't form a habit, after taking the knowledge back, you will forget it in 7 days. After letting him practice a few times, he will be much better." Yue Hao said. It is also for this reason that when HP Business School recommends a course, it does not recommend a course, but a training program. This program includes several courses. Because these courses are provided by HP, their inherent values and The logical relationship is consistent. There is no conflict in forming management habits.

At the same time, the business school's teaching method also strengthens action learning, that is, students need to choose a difficult or challenging project that they have encountered in actual work, or a breakthrough that the leader wants him to achieve, etc., and then Apply the management skills and management methods mentioned in class to practical work while in class. When the final training project is over, it may be half a year or a year later, and he will have a report on how much the things mentioned in the training have been used and how much he has improved his project.

“Many of our customers have seen great improvement in this process. For example, customers in the manufacturing industry can clearly see cost savings, and in the customer’s sales department, they can clearly see business improvement.” Yue Hao said , "Of course, these cannot be guaranteed 100% by training, but there will definitely be a considerable number of students who have changed a lot through this learning. Because our courses are the results of HP's actual work, they are used." "So I said that taking classes is only the first step. Learning our things and forming management behaviors are the minimum requirements. In the end, we hope to bring business value directly through training, that is, more turnover, faster growth, and lower costs, or The risk is lower, etc."

In addition to the business school, the training division led by Yue Hao has several other colleges (see the sidebar "The Composition of the HP Training Division"), among which IT managers The training with IT technicians will become a simulation training. When students come to class, it is like sitting in an IT department. Today, they come to work and are assigned a job. The job assigned to each student is different. Same because they are different departments. Then, the real thing happened. This kind of simulation training undoubtedly has a positive effect on the formation of management habits.

Behind the Curriculum: Value Alignment

All courses at HP Business School are based on HP's corporate values.

The popularity of HP Business School's courses is not limited to HP's practical methods, which, of course, do work. After all, HP will be established for 70 years by next year. It has experienced economic ups and downs and summed up many very valuable management practices.

But more importantly, the impact of HP's culture and values. The two founders of HP have had very distinct values from the very beginning. The later HP Way is highly respected in the industry. For the students, they not only come to HP Business School to study a course, but also realize a cultural exchange.

This is also confirmed by the students. At the opening ceremony of a Hewlett-Packard-Vanke MBA training camp, Vanke's general manager Yu Liang made no secret of his admiration for HP's approach, "HP has always been Vanke's model for learning, in terms of purpose, vision, strategy, personnel development and In many aspects, such as training, he has played the role of a methodological expert."

Yue Hao often deals with students and feels a lot about this. Sometimes, when he sees that a client has bought a full set of business school courses, he will ask. In fact, some courses, such as time management, are also available in external training institutions. Why should you buy a full set. Yue Hao was impressed by the other party's answer at that time. They said, "We are particularly concerned about a set of courses, and the values behind each course are the same. This is very important."

The students said, "Your values are my own Acceptance, such as emphasizing performance, emphasizing team, respecting individuals, emphasizing enthusiasm for customers, these are the same as ours, so I use your set of courses, I am very relieved."

In fact, HP Business School itself is HP A product of corporate values. You know, as early as 1966, in the second version of the company's goals, Hewlett-Packard proposed the concept of social citizenship, "obeying the duties of a good citizen of society. Contributing to the communities and social institutions in which it does business, and repaying the people it shapes. surroundings". There is also a sentence in the garage law: share tools and ideas, and trust partners. Since its establishment in 2001, the number of people trained by HP Business School has exceeded 5,500 people. The fact that there are peach and plum all over the world proves the continuous growth of HP culture.