HP Innovation Journal Issue 11: Winter 2018 | Page 49
Employees join their handprints in a collage during
festivities celebrating the HP-Samsung integration.
Solutions Company in Korea in 2013, decided to move back to
Korea with my family, and began working in January of 2014.
After several years, boom—just like the home run by
Gibson—the announcement came. HP acquired Samsung
Printing Solutions for over $1 billion, the single-largest
print investment the company has ever made. To go after
the $55 billion A3 market by leveraging the great intellectual
properties and people resources in the deal, HP made an
incredibly strategic investment.
When two multibillion dollar companies become one, it
is natural to expect that there will be challenges. In this
particular case, one of the biggest challenges—or perhaps the
biggest challenge—is working through cultural differences.
Having lived in both the U.S. and Korea for over 20 years
each, having worked at HP for 13 years and at Samsung
for four years, I personally witnessed and experienced
how daunting these cultural differences can be. There are
language barriers, both spoken and unspoken, differences in
communication styles and in organizational structures, and
differences in how decisions are made and executed, to name
a few. When I think of the new HP family members in Korea,
as I was privileged to experience first-hand, I see the decades’
worth of history, an incredible level of commitment and
perseverance, an exceptional focus on speedy execution, all
seven of the CXO executives in a single three-story building,
countless nights of working overtime and weekends, and
a buck-stops-here attitude. Now, since Day One in a new
company, these 1,700 new HP employees have learned how
to use Outlook, conduct remote meetings, correspond in
another language, work from home when necessary, and work
with people across different time zones—all for the first time
in their lives!
Early on in my life, while watching and playing various sports,
I learned that, when things become complex and difficult, it
helps to go back to the fundamentals and execute them well.
I believe this is what, in the long run, separates the champions
from the contenders.
For the newly combined HP and Samsung, I feel that the
same holds true. Clear objective-setting, open and candid
communications at all levels, trust and respect among all
employees from senior executives to individual contributors,
a growth mind-set in everything we do, creating and
maintaining a culture of diversity and inclusion, and fostering
employee engagement are all critical fundamentals that we
must focus on practicing and sharing with one another as
colleagues. Ultimately, the execution of these fundamentals
will lead us to success both as individuals and as a company.
As we enter the second year of the integration as one
company, I am even more excited about the journey that will
bring different cultures together and about the opportunities
that we will have to learn more about one another while
working toward the same goal of reinventing print through
collaboration and teamwork.
HR INNOVATION
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