It is unacceptable for Owen Kemp, Vice-President Hewlett-Packard and Managing Director HP Russia, to hear that something cannot be done. So, he thinks that change is one of the most important factors of success in everything. He describes two his somewhat controversial competencies - being both an anarchist and an optimist.
1. What is your other competency?
The other one that I am well-known for within HP community is being both an anarchist and an optimist. Anarchist has the ugly flavor to it, so not that part of it, I'm really questioning the status-quo, pushing the needle and getting out of the beaten track and going to new horizons. That's why I was sent here because our CEO at that time felt that we were too stable and not ripping the benefits of the new Russia, so she asked me to come here and push the needle. I think, I've done it successfully. Not being satisfied with the status-quo and looking for different opportunities, the life beyond the status-quo - that's what I'm also known for.
2. What is anarchism for you?
The anarchist is natural for me because I get bored very easily. If something is the same every day I find it very hard to get up in the morning and going to the office. My philosophy is if something is so repetitive you can either automate it or give it to a monkey to do. Something that is repetitive in today's' information age really must be automated or eliminated or outsourced, consolidated with something else, because it's cruel to have somebody doing exactly the same thing every day without improving it. That's what my anarchism comes from, and I believe that everybody who comes to work should be able to answer to himself after six months how did this change. Have you done something with it? Have you given it your shape? Have you changed it? Have you improved it? Has it got cheaper, faster, with higher quality, less mistakes - what ever, but something has to be changed if a human body is responsible for it, the elite of the animal world. If he's responsible for it - than it has to get better.
3. Do you have any experience of that kind?
We went through it many times: the Compaq merge where we had to give up a lot of our old habits, lots of our organizational models, etc. But since then we've acquired 35 other companies, and I think as the pace of business increases worldwide, the economy offers some sorts of permutations; change becomes so relevant for us that we observe our staff really under the looking glass to see whether they are change agents or preventors of change. We try to coach them, but, you know, a person that is a change agent will certainly make it in a management sphere. One that needs skills and resists it certainly needs help and a manager should give him help.
4. It's impossible to implement change without communication, is it?
The one thing I've noticed that changes from culture to culture is that in some gloomy cultures you find a majority of people explaining to you why the idea won't work. I was reading this morning that Daily Dilbert told one of his colleagues: "Your head is where ideas go to die". If you have counter parts in your organization, and you give them a vision and tell them what you're going to do and then the person delivers you an encyclopedia with the reasons why it will not going to work, and some of them might be valid as well. Of course it's better to start thinking about what could make it work or how could we change the vision so it will work. In some cultures you see more of it, in some cultures you see less, but it's really the individual that starts looking at things positively and how something can be adopted. And it really starts with asking yourself that question and immediately change the attitude. It doesn't need to be a psychologist and have a lot of training - you have to think how it could work.
5. Do you appreciate criticism also?
There's a balance here, I have an allergy towards somebody who only navigates the encyclopedia of how it isn't going to work. People with enthusiasm that sparkles in the eye, that can do attitude, that can really also suggest and alternative path or how to change something, or some concerns about what we have to take care of on this path - but not somebody, whose head is where ideas go to die.
6. Could you recall on any interesting example of that case?
When I arrived here I was told all the time that there's no relevant life in the regions and that in Russia everything is Moscow-based and may be a little for political reasons in St. Petersburg. But I was very excited to work in the largest country on the planet and I wanted to see some of it and I was desperate to see some signs of life in the regions and to get some buy in of the regional expansion program. There I looked for some internal sponsors, somebody who would carry the message forward and who could join me in this adventure. You know some people often have some curiosity to see if there are some living people outside of Moscow and whether people still are hunting bears or doing some useful things in the regions. So that special combat team of mine started going to the regions, and that's the sort of leadership that sometimes you have to show. If they see that the boss goes there and he comes back without any bite marks of bears or any ugly disease, then maybe it's ok. So if the boss goes there may be I can get some brownie points showing that I also like the regions.
7. What was the result of going to the regions?
When we started going there, we went step by step, not immediately, of course, to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, but first to cities like Ekaterinburg, Samara and others. Of course there's lots of business there, of course partners are already there, and when we started shaking the tree in these regional cities, it was astonishing what we were already missing. And I came back with bags of follow-up duties and tasks to do. And very quickly the ice was broken. And now if you would ask my staff to stand up and say who has been behind the Urals, five years ago you would only a few people who had done it. But now you will find a huge community already. The fact that our regional growth was twice the country average and even now bad times they are shrinking at a lower rate than the "corporate" Moscow based business. And I think we were rewarded enough for that strategy.
8. Many top executives are afraid of going to the regions.
Even in this period we continue to open offices, we have just opened a new one in Kaliningrad, and we have a few more in the pie ply, and also we look at the experience worldwide, a million population cities are where we want to be. We are so broadly set up from a consumer in small and medium business, to enterprise business that customers need us closer to them, they need our support, spare parts and competence closer to them. So it makes sense here as well.
9. Where does you optimism comes from?
I think in principle everybody needs and has the hope for a good outcome of something. And I think all of us would feel suicidal if we wouldn't have that hope, and a certain level of optimism about the future state of being possibly better. I think it needs encouraging a little bit more by the right management techniques or just communication and questioning techniques. The fact is that most old people turn religious in their old age because they cannot also live without an optimistic view to their future. If our lives would be just looking at the potential deaths we would be gloomy from our birth. Trying to portray for oneself a compelling future is a natural thing and it can be nurtured and encouraged by an appropriate management skill. And also parents are managers of their kids and do the same - and it becomes a habit probably.
10. Did you have any situation when you had to put your optimism aside?
Of course, we have setbacks all the time and particularly in a large global corporation you don't have all the knobs - somebody else has a set of knobs and sometimes it's turning into direction when you're not completely in favor of. And if you're sitting in a market that is not always in the same cycle as the rest of the world, so you have sometimes to live with decisions and situations that are neither positive for you nor fruitful for what you're trying to accomplish, might even be harmful for it. You need to either kill it but sometimes you cannot change it, because the mother ship is going in a certain direction and cannot handle too many permutations of the strategy. That's where you get a certain level of frustration and gloominess but as long as the balance is ok you can get back upon your feet and make the most of the situation.
