DAVID Packard, a legend in the US electronics industry, died last week at the age of 83 after a brief illness.
His death marks the end of one of the most enduring and successful business partnerships in the industry. Together with Bill Hewlett, Packard formed the company that bears their names in 1939 - starting out with just $538 in cash and working in a rented garage in Palo Alto, California.
Today, Hewlett Packard has 100,000 employees in 120 countries. The company recorded revenues of more than $31 billion last year and is a leading manufacturer of computers, printers and a broad range of electronic instruments used in industry, science and medicine.
An imposing, six foot five figure with a deep baritone voice, Packard led Hewlett Packard as president or chairman from the date of the company's incorporation in 1947 until his retirement in 1993.
He was also active in government, serving as deputy defence secretary in the first Nixon administration from 1969 to 1971, and later as a trusted adviser and member of several government commissions. In particular, he helped to foster US business ties with China in the 1970s.
But Packard will be best remembered as one of Silicon Valley's first technology entrepreneurs. When they formed their company, Hewlett and Packard, who met as students at Stanford University, created in northern California the world's largest complex of high tech industry - a trend thousands of others have followed in the past half century.
Their influence on corporate, America runs deep. Their legacy, and the achievement that Packard was most proud of is a management style based one openness and respect for the individual that has became a model for the electronics industry and beyond.
From the outset, Hewlett and, Packard believed that employees, should have an opportunity to share in the progress of their company. They gave production bonuses to early employees, "and the same share was paid to the Janitor as the top manager", Hewlett recalled in a 1992 interview. Later this evolved into an employee stock option scheme, that has become the standard for US high tech start ups.
"We both felt fundamentally that people want to do a good job," Hewlett said. "They just, need guidelines on how to do it. The role of managers, they believed, was to lead, rather than merely direct.
"Some people know all the details of how to manage something, but they just don't have leadership capability. And that's one thing that's extremely important," Packard said last year, when his book The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company was published.
"We didn't want to have a hire and fire company, Hewlett explained. At the time, their approach was radical. "Profit was a businessman's sole objective. Labour was considered a commodity that could be bought and sold on the market," Packard recalled in his book.
By contrast the "HP Way" is informal and open. They believed in "MBWA - management by wandering around. And they rigorously practised an open door policy. Even today, there are few offices with doors in Hewlett Packard facilities.
While numerous younger companies have imitated their management style, Hewlett and Packard were in other ways very different from the current generation of high tech entrepreneurs.
They did not start out with big ambitions. "We thought we would have a job for ourselves. That's all we thought about in the beginning - we hadn't the slightest idea of building a big company," Packard said last year.
Nor did they seek financial backers. They were determined not to "operate on borrowed money", Hewlett said. They were also averse to risk. In the mid 1960s, for example, as HewlettPackard made its way into the computer market, Packard halted development of a high speed computer which might have leapfrogged competitors. "It would have been way ahead of even the best computer today," he said 30 years later. But "we didn't want to gamble. Whether we should have, or not, it's too late to know [but] it turned out well in the long run.
Hewlett and Packard had no "grand vision" of technological breakthroughs like many of their modern day counterparts. Instead, they turned their hands to whatever kind of mechanical or electrical equipment customers required. "Professors of management are devastated when I say we were successful because we had no plans," Hewlett said with a grin. "We just took on odd jobs."
Some were odd indeed. They included developing an optical device to flush a urinal automatically, an automatic lettuce thinner - designed to thin out rows of vegetable seedlings - and a shock machine to help people lose weight.
But Hewlett Packard found its niche with a device invented by Hewlett during post graduate studies at Stanford University. The audio oscillator, for measuring sound waves, gave HewlettPackard its - first commercial - success with an order from Walt Disney for use in production of the cartoon feature Fantasia.
Later, the company would become an early leader in the market for pocket calculators, despite Packard's scepticism. "We weren't sure we could make money on it," Hewlett said. He eventually persuaded Packard that if they could sell 10,000 they would break even. "Well, we sold something like 100,000 in the first year," Hewlett said.
Even outside their company, the two men shared many common interests, jointly operating cattle ranches in California and Idaho and regularly sharing family holidays. During Packard's final illness, Hewlett was a daily visitor to his friend's bedside.
Today in California the Packard name is associated with philanthropic activities. There is the Lucile Salter Packard Children's Hospital at Stanford, named after his late wife, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium, a research facility as well as a popular tourist attraction, funded by the Packard family foundation. Both Hewlett and Packard are also well known as benefactors of Stanford University.
For the past 30 years, the Packard foundation has distributed about $35 million a year to support education, medicine, the arts and conservation. The trust will now receive all Packard's 9.2 per cent stake in Hewlett Packard, worth about $4.4 billion.