Dion Weisler is the Executive Vice President of HP's Printing and Personal Systems organization, a $57 billion annual revenue business that includes personal computers, mobility devices, technical workstations, printers, graphics solutions, managed-print services, and internet services. He has been named the future CEO of HP Inc. when that company separates from Hewlett Packard Enterprise later this year. His rise at HP has been meteoric, and his prior success at both Acer and Lenovo, including stints in dozens of countries across the globe mean that he has a healthy knowledge of the competitive landscape and appreciation for the need to balance serving mature markets and developing markets differently.
I met with Weisler at HP Discover, the company's customer event in Las Vegas earlier this month. We met in a make-shift office his leadership team kept in the Venetian Las Vegas. He was surrounded by members of his leadership team as we spoke, but the casual yet insightful conversation offered great insight into where things stand in the separation, his own thoughts about where he sees opportunities for the future, and I got a glimpse into how excited he is about the future of HP Inc., and the need to emphasize innovation (including pursuing moon-shot-type projects), and the need to find talent across the globe.
(This is the 11th article in the IT Influencers series. To read past interviews with executive such as Sal Khan of Khan Academy, Jim Goodnight of SAS, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Yves Behar of Fuseproject, former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Sir James Dyson of Dyson Company, please visit this link. To read future articles in the series, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: Dion, I thought that we would begin with how things are progressing as HP Inc. becomes its own independent entity, separate from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Where are you in the transition?
Dion Weisler: This is a massive undertaking for all the right reasons. We are more convinced with every day that goes by, that this was exactly the right thing to do because our markets are changing, and the customers are changing.
The personal systems business, the printing business, and the consumer side of the business has always moved pretty quickly. What you could always count on in the past is that the enterprise business took things a little slower and in its stride. The pace is much faster now. Therefore, to service our customers’ needs to be flexible, to be agile, to be really focused on what we have to do here, it makes all the sense in the world. As we talked to CIOs, as we speak to customers, and as we speak to our partners, they absolutely get what we are doing here. We are more than halfway through our journey, and I think things are going exactly according to plan.
When we started, we established a separation management office. I think we had every consulting agency on the planet involved at one point or another. The best practice is to keep the business running. Ninety-nine and a half percent of us are focused on the day-to-day running of the business and mainly focused on the customers and partners, whilst a relative handful of folks are focused on separation all day, every day, and they are doing a colossal task. The long pole in the tent, of course, is IT because this company has been together for 75 years and we have made something like 70 acquisitions along the way, sucked all those companies in, and bulked their IT systems onto our IT systems. We must now disentangle this organization that operates in more than 160 countries around the planet with thousands of applications, disentangling all of the entities and the tax structures, and the like. This will be completed in the back-half of the year.
As excitement builds, we are emboldened to accelerate innovation, to accelerate our focus on the customers, and you can feel it around the company. People are feeling very accountable for their business. They feel sharp and they are excited about what this means for both.
High: Where do you see growth opportunities in the various areas that HP Inc. encompasses?
Weisler: If you think today across the business at a high-level, what moves to HP Inc. is our printing franchise and our personal systems franchise. Within personal systems, we do everything from consumer phablets to commercial phablets and tablets, to PCs, notebooks, detachables, convertibles, hard goods, thin clients, and work stations.
On the printing side, there’s really three principle businesses that we have. We have a laser business, we have an ink-based business, and we have a large graphics business that people don’t often talk about. Almost 90 percent of billboards around the planet are printed on very large print presses, many of them using HP printers. When you buy a book from Amazon today, they don’t have that sitting in stock. They print you one individual copy on a large print press that’s powered by HP technology. This is transforming the way business models can operate in the future because you do not have these large warehousing costs. So there’s more than 50 trillion pages printed every year. Most of those are still printed on old Guttenberg-style type print presses. There is a shift happening from analog printing pages toward digital printing pages, and so we love that business.
We look to expand and extend our reach into new growth areas. Graphics is a good example of that, leveraging a technology that is very scalable. We built a page-wide array technology. We stretch it, and we put it in a $4 million word press. We took that same technology, and we pressed it back down again and figured out how to spray different materials through it, and it’s the core of our 3-D printing in general. It is highly leverageable as we get into these new growth areas.
We see growth in commercial mobility. We think that’s still a fairly small nascent market today. There is obviously a lot of heat in consumer mobility, but commercial mobility is not so much about the past, it is about changing work flows inside an enterprise and the future., We are building practices that focus on the verticals of education, retail, and the manufacturing shop floor, so we pick three or four verticals and get very specific in that area. Of course, we are developing new categories for the future under the umbrella of what we call “blended reality,” which is the mixing of our physical and digital worlds as we pull those together.
At the front end you have immersive computing, and its first incarnation of a product that we called Sprout, and it is a great way to bring things from our physical world immediately into our digital world very simply, change it and manipulate it through 3-D printing, then take it in its new morphed format back out into the physical world as printed object.
So we sort of have these clear buckets of our core business, the largest part of our $57 billion business. We have a few areas of growth that we are focused on and then these big bets that we’re placing for the future.
High: How do you balance the need to grow and innovate versus cutting costs and becoming more efficient?
Weisler: We want to be a company grounded in innovation and quality. You cannot cut your way to glory. I think you have to innovate your way to success. The vast majority of our R&D investments will go toward building upon our core businesses. That probably equates to 75 percent of our activity. Most of the remaining 25 percent needs to be reserved big bets. If we do that, we will have a constant wave of innovation coming out into the marketplace.
High: As you have noted, 3-D printing is an area of growth. It has gotten a lot of favorable press as an area of tremendous innovation. How will this innovation evolve from the commercial to the consumer space?
Weisler: If we go way back in time, you had a blacksmith who would make a unique horseshoe for your horse, as an example. That would be the manufacturing process. With the industrial revolution, the assembly line was created, and over the years we got better at pressing the supply chain, and making that assembly line more efficient. Manufacturing was still in the hands of a few. The internet comes along, and we can collapse and make that supply chain even more efficient and close it. It still was not really a dramatic change. With 3-D printing, you actually get to democratize manufacturing again because anybody can do it.
Now, where does that start? In our view, the greatest amount of value actually starts in the commercial marketplace. Ultimately as these technologies mature, it will make its way into the consumer realm, as well. Some have another strategy to grow from consumer up. I think the reason it has not taken off either in consumer or commercial, is as an industry we have not solved the problem of speed, quality, and cost. If you really want to be instructive to traditional manufacturing processes, you have to have it operate at the right speed, you have to have the right kind of quality, and you have to have an economic model that makes sense. So with multi-jet fusion, we believe we have made a really big breakthrough here.
Those who actually understand the industry well, and understand what we have done, recognize that we are printing copy ten times faster than the fastest printer on the market today. We can do it with minute accuracy down to 21 microns-- about a tenth of a size of a human hair. We can do very intricate parts that still have really strong mechanical properties. Then because of the technique we use to print the part - we do it on a big flat bed - we can do highly economical parts that begin to make a difference. I think initially it will lend itself more towards commercial markets in the near-term.
We took another decision to open up the suppliers so we create an ecosystem of suppliers – so what will make materials for the 3-D printers. We’ve also opened that up so we can get specialty materials. Because the technology lends itself to doing that, we can do plastics. We can also demonstrate that we can do ceramics by changing materials. In the future, we see a road map where the smallest building block is called a voxel of any printed part- it’s like a pixel is to a screen- and we can change the properties or attributes of a voxel. We can make the voxel just a solid black speck, we can change the color properties of a voxel and make it any color you like. In the future we will be able to change the translucency of the voxel, be able to change the rigidity of the voxel, leaving out changing the mechanical properties of the voxel. Think of the sophisticated parts you can create and you can create them really quickly, change all of those attributes and create an economic model that makes a lot of sense.
I think initially it will start heavily into the prototyping, it will be in print service providers and that’s how consumers will get access to it. They will log onto a site like Shapeways—who is a close partner of ours—and they will be able to send a part through that will end up on one of our printers and it will change the economics of their business because of the speed, quality, and cost that we derive.
Then there will be large organizations, like a car company that is doing prototyping and making parts, that will print parts to test functionality before they get go on to mass production. You will see a lot of that going on. Indeed, we did it ourselves as we were creating the product. We die-cast the part when we were making the first model and the part was breaking all the time inside the 3-D printer. So we knew it only lasted ten hours, so we went through this one part over and over again and we had to keep making parts. It was extremely expensive and took a long time. When it was up and running, we 3-D printed that part for itself and made the mechanical problems much stronger. So we actually had the printer print itself and it’s a much better part for it. And so you’ll see that happen in other sorts of industries as well.
Eventually over time, you will see these technologies start in commercial and make their way down into corporate department level, and then eventually make it’ll make its way down into consumer. This is a long-term journey, it’s a multi-year journey. We are still in the infancy, we are building the ecosystem, and it is coming together quite nicely.
High: To foster the kind of innovation you have described means building and maintaining a strong team. What’s the pitch to join HP Inc.?
Weisler: I think Bill [Hewlett] and Dave [Packard] set the footprint for innovation across the planet and that is something that over the course of the last 75 years every CEO has embraced. So, we have deep R&D capabilities. It now goes well beyond Silicon Valley, however. In fact, our 3-D printing was developed in Barcelona. We now have some of our 3-D printing work going on in Corvallis, Oregon. We have sites in Boise, Idaho. We have sites in Taiwan, Israel, Shanghai, and Singapore. Innovation can come from anywhere, and having a great diverse pool of talent scattered around the planet enables us to access the best and the brightest wherever they may be.
Most of what will be HP Inc. is currently part of Printing and Personal Systems (PPS). I built that leadership team over the last couple of years. We’ve been working together closely for a while now. That said, some of the shared functions like Human Resources, Finance, and Marketing require new leaders. An example is Antonio Lucio, who is our new chief marketing officer. He came from Visa and Pepsi prior to that. He is someone who joined us out of respect for our past, but also with an excitement for the challenges and opportunities ahead. He has indicated that this is the strongest leadership team he has had the opportunity to work with.
Stuart Pann joined us to lead Operations after a distinguished 33-year career at Intel. Many in the industry had hoped to lure Stuart away from Intel. When he saw the quality of this leadership team, he knew he wanted to be a part of this.
Our team sees that we have one of the best couple of franchises in America, in our PC and print business. In addition to that, the promise of growth and exciting opportunity to transform something as we go on to immersive computing, blended reality and building the umbrella, and 3-D printing has been an attractive proposition for leaders we have brought into the fold. It is just a cool place to be.
High: As you think about your customers around the globe, how do you think about opportunity in different regions of the world?
Weisler: The next three billion eyeballs will not come from mature markets. That is why it is so important to have a very rich diverse development organization. Our China development center is developing products in China for China. They also happen to work pretty well at creating products for India because of the similarities between those emerging markets. We scatter out innovation around the planet to ensure that we understand the needs of each region.
A good example of that is in India where we released a phablet device called the Slate VoiceTab. We created it specifically for India. Why? Because we have about a third of the market share in traditional PCs and an incredibly strong channel including franchise HP world stores. It is wonderful when you go there. These people feel a part of our organization and they very much are. With that kind of brand power that we have there, we created a special phablet device for them. It went from nothing to about a ten percent share in about six months.
High: You have advanced quickly in your career. You have accrued experiences in sales and product development. You have worked for a number of major technology firms. You have lived and worked in a diverse array of countries. As you reflect on the keys to your success, what advice would you give to someone at an earlier stage in their career?
Weisler: A key is to take charge of your own career early in your career. I think often a mistake that a lot of folks make is they think it is their manager’s responsibility to give them experiences and take them on the path of their career. The earlier you start, the faster you can move because you have been very deliberate about what you’re doing. Actually list your goals. Write them down. Note the experiences you have now, depending on how far you are in the career, you’ll have different checkpoints along the way, but there will be gaps between what you have now and what you need to have in order to achieve your own goal. Then you start the path: how can I pick up those attributes from job to job to fill the gaps? Identify more than one path because you do not want to be boxed in.
I think the biggest piece of advice is to take yourself out of your comfort zone. I think we often fall into the trap of choosing the comfortable path. I went for the uncomfortable “get-a-bunch-of-experiences” route every time, every day of the week, and it has paid off.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book, Implementing World Class IT Strategy, has just been released by Wiley Press/Jossey-Bass. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. Follow him on Twitter @WorldClassIT.
