David Packard

Pueblo, Colorado, sent him to Stanford with a talent for science and a better one for sport. David Packard lettered in football and basketball, made Phi Beta Kappa, and graduated in 1934 into the worst job market the country had. The professor who mattered was Fred Terman, who told engineering students to start companies rather than join them. Packard joined one anyway, spending three years at General Electric in Schenectady. In 1938 he returned to Stanford for a master's in electrical engineering and married Lucile Salter, whom he had met there. The next year he and Bill Hewlett, another Terman student, put 538 dollars into a Palo Alto garage partnership and flipped a coin over whose name came first. Hewlett won.

The company became the world's largest maker of electronic test equipment, but the thing that traveled furthest was how he ran it. In 1957 he put HP's objectives in writing and told managers to hit them however they liked. Executives sat in open bays without reserved parking. The lab stores stayed unlocked. Every employee shared in the profits. When orders fell in 1970, nobody was laid off: hours and pay dropped 10 percent across the company for six months, executives included. It has been copied so widely that it reads as ordinary. In 1957 it was close to heresy.

Nixon made him Deputy Secretary of Defense in January 1969. Packard put his HP stock into a trust and pledged every dollar of its appreciation to charity, about 22 million dollars by the time he left, and took a federal salary near 30,000 dollars in place of the nearly one million a year he had been making. Under Melvin Laird he worked on procurement, scrapping Robert McNamara's total package contracts and founding the Defense Systems Management College, and on the Total Force policy that moved the reserves and the National Guard to the front of any future call-up as the draft wound down. He held the job through the bombing of Cambodia, the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the drawdown in Vietnam, and resigned in December 1971. The nine-day fortnight at HP had run without him.

His daughters chose where much of the money went. Nancy and Julie pushed him toward the ocean, and in 1984 the Monterey Bay Aquarium opened on Cannery Row with 55 million dollars behind it and Julie as its executive director. The foundation he and Lucile started in 1964 took the rest, along with a children's hospital at Stanford that carries her name. He chaired Reagan's Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management in 1985 and 1986, and kept HP in South Africa under apartheid, saying he would rather lose business in Nebraska. He died on March 26, 1996, leaving roughly 4 billion dollars to the foundation. He was a Republican and, by many accounts, blunt to the point of harshness.

David Packard's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Hewlett-Packard company
  Founded with Bill Hewlett on 538 dollars in a Palo Alto garage 1939
• The HP corporate objectives other
  Six objectives put in writing, a seventh added in 1966 1957
• David and Lucile Packard Foundation company
  Received the bulk of his estate in 1996 1964
• Monterey Bay Aquarium other
  Built for 55 million dollars, directed by his daughter Julie 1984
• Report of the Blue Ribbon Commission on Defense Management other
  The Packard Commission, on how the Pentagon buys things 1986
• The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company book
  His own account of the method, published a year before he died 1995

• 1939 aged ~27 Formalizes the partnership with Bill Hewlett A coin toss put Hewlett's name first. The initial capital was 538 dollars.
• August 18, 1947 aged 34 HP incorporates, with Packard as its first president He held the presidency until 1964, then became chief executive and chairman.
• 1957 aged ~45 Writes down the HP objectives The company also went public that November.
• 1964 aged ~52 He and Lucile establish the Packard Foundation
• January 24, 1969 aged 56 Sworn in as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Melvin Laird He put his HP stock in trust and pledged its appreciation to charity.
• 1970 aged ~58 HP cuts hours and pay 10 percent rather than lay anyone off The nine-day fortnight ran for six months while Packard was at the Pentagon.
• December 13, 1971 aged 59 Leaves the Pentagon and returns to HP as chairman He chaired the board from 1972 until 1993.
• October 20, 1984 aged 72 The Monterey Bay Aquarium opens on Cannery Row Julie Packard became its executive director.
• October 17, 1988 aged 76 Reagan awards him the Presidential Medal of Freedom The National Medal of Technology came the same year.

• William Hewlett 1913–2001
  Designed HP's first product and the pocket calculator that ended the slide rule. partner
• Richard Nixon 1913–1994
  37th President whose foreign policy achievements were overshadowed by the Watergate scandal. appointed by
• Robert Noyce 1927–1990
  Co-inventor of the integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel, earning him the title Mayor of Silicon Valley. influenced
• Gordon Moore 1929–2023
  Co-founder of Intel whose observation became Moore's Law, driving decades of semiconductor progress. influenced
• Steve Jobs 1955–2011
  Co-founder of Apple who revolutionized personal computing, music, and mobile communications. influenced