Respect and politeness, contribution, striving for something better and the need for adventure are the core value for Owen Kemp, Vice-President Hewlett-Packard and Managing Director HP Russia. In his opinion, it's important to be surrounded by different types of personalities in order to achieve goals. He also tells us what is unique about HP and what is the number one priority for today for his company.
1. What values do you share in life?
For me, and I think that was coming from my boarding school experience in England when I was a kid, mutual respect is a very important topic. It's the thing that differentiates the human being. For me every person in HP even from the lowest level to the highest level deserves that respect and that attention, and I look very closely and get sometimes very frustrated that we don't observe it sufficiently. If I look at the queue at the cafeteria or a queue at the security at Domodedovo, I see how painful we make life for ourselves: jumping the queue, pushing people out of the way. This is not really necessary and we were educated in my school that respect and politeness, understanding of the others is an important factor and I try to do it to everyone from the security guard at my apartment to my driver and to my boss. I treat them all with the same amount of respect - this is just the basis of communication.
2. What is contribution for you?
Making a contribution, striving for something better, changing one's own life for the better and the surrounding as well is also important for me. I always ask my daughter how she tries to improve things, and also I try to increase my sport's and fitness level, I try to read all the stuff that is relevant to my job. Making the contribution and improving what someone does all the time and not accepting the status-quo - that's a value that I live by. I've mentioned that positive, optimistic, can-do attitude that also is important for me, I don't know what the value is called but it's being competitive and ambitious - but for me I'm in the competition to win. I don't want to bother about whether I'll be fifth or seventh, hopefully won't be last. I need to be in a race to win. I think I've done enough to prepare myself to win and thinking of compelling vision of winning, and I get my enthusiasm and my energy, optimism and drive from this compelling vision of what it's like to win.
3. What else is important for you?
I like adventure, it's the value for me, I like the smell of gun powder, I like new frontiers, new lines of business, new ways of doing business. And diversity is important for me because I think that if you just surround yourself and work with people that look alike or come from the same background than you're missing a lot in life and you can learn from a diverse group much more than you can from obedient look-alikes. All of my management team that I've put together, but also all my private life I collect people like stamps, I like to collect people that are controversial to me, that have different educational background, that come from possibly different country. And that has always worked well for me because that gives you new input, new excitement, reduces your risk as well because if they all look alike, and just look at me and do what I say - there's too much responsibility on my shoulders. I like the risk management that comes from the diversity of the team.
4. Is there any reason why you can immediately ask any member of your team to leave?
I don't like standards of business conducts which are basically cheating and breaking the rules; that's one reason why I will ask someone to leave, most others would be where I give another chance, where I try to coach, to come to an agreement, to improve and to help.
5. What's unique about HP?
HP, I think is culturally unique. It stands for that entrepreneurial founding culture that Hewlett and Packard had when they established the company in a garage. And the management style and the culture of innovation in the company still lives on from those days. That's really unique.
6. What is your number one priority for today?
It's to navigate our ship through this turbulent storm by not making the business less healthy, it can be a little lower level but still making the business worthwhile to do and not losing any foundation that we will regret two years from now when the business picks up again. And foundation for me is customers, and we want to stay close to those customers, still help them in their situation as well and we don't want to lose market share. If we still have the market share even better than now, we will still have the customer relation, and they feel that we're doing the good job for them also in bad times, then I think we'll be able to benefit from the upswing.
7. What do you do to manage with this challenge?
It's to look at the world from the customer's view. Of course, for the customer it's also important to cut costs and optimize his business and so we're looking how technology can actually help the customer to reduce cost, make them maybe more competitive, so they can attract those few customers that are still buying easier and can win against their own competitors, and possibly create some new products or services that they can sell more efficiently to their customers. Taking customer-by-customer we're really accessing where IT can be an enabler to reduce cost and become more efficient, but also increase competitiveness and possible grow into some areas where it still makes sense. And IT is the foundation for business today, and all business models in the companies somehow depend on IT. I think it's only natural that in IT company people would look at the business situation the customer has and see how this IT can help them to fulfill the business requirements which cut costs.
