You've probably heard of Moore's Law, and probably even Metcalfe's Law, but this week Hewlett-Packard chairman, CEO and president Lewis Platt outlined a set of rules for successful business practices in the Internet age that he dubbed "Lew's Laws".
Speaking at IDC's European IT Forum here in Paris, Platt said that organisations need to adapt to the rash of new Internet technologies coming onto the market in order to survive, and he outlined a five-point plan for their success. But above all, large organisations, including HP, need to think like small organisations and overcome the problems of complexity and inertia that weigh them down, he said.
Lew's Laws, or rules for survival in the connected electronic world, consist of the following:
-- make sure that your company continually produces new products that make existing products obsolete;-- hire a wide range of employees from all backgrounds, ethnicities, lifestyles and cultures;-- listen to your young and low-level employees, who often have new and interesting perspectives;-- move quickly and at Internet time;-- and finally, simplify the complexity of your IT infrastructure and make the network simple to use for everyone.
To raise its profile in the Internet business, HP plans to launch a huge push to its corporate customers positioning itself as a provider of Internet products, especially for organisations that want to meld Unix with Windows NT, Platt said.