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 47