The New Hp: the Clean Room and Beyond

What do you think of the implementation of the decisions of the “clean room”, particularly:

- the decision to choose the best “set of system” of the two companies, rather than redesign a new perfect set of systems (see page 7, paragraph 1);

- the expression “shut up and eat it” (see page 9, paragraph 6).

At the beginning, the merger between Hewlett-Packed (HP) and Compaq was considered very complicated. Since the two companies were competitors. On the one hand, both of them were big players in the information technology industry, though with very different corporate cultures. On the other hand, the merger would achieve great benefits to both companies if it turned out to be successful; to generate greater cost synergies and drive a significantly improved cost structure. The two companies used the term “clean room” to describe employees reassigned from their jobs to focus exclusively on the integration.

First of all, the “adopt and go” strategy was used to manage the decision-making process. The step that the clean room took to establish directions for the newly combined companies was to choose the best systems from both of them, instead of trying to redesign a new perfect set of systems. However, due to time limitation, the clean room was unable to analyze every detail of the process. The decision to choose the best system between HP and Compaq would define “a cold-eyed winnowing of the process and products” which ensure the approach preserved the best features of each company and discarded the rest. Because there were always issues during the course of the planning process; HP tends to take longer time to do things, by focusing strongly on the process, whereas, Compaq are quicker on decision-making as it was more focused on the short-term projects. Nevertheless, the core values between the two companies were very similar and generally, people from both sides worked quite well.

Secondly, the “Shut up and eat it” solution. The employees’ job was to...