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You have talked a lot about being a global citizen.
The press talks about it. I am just who I am.
What are your plans with growing, emerging markets?
As I have said on numberous occasions, personally I have a real issue with the term emerging markets. I will tell you why. It is hard to qualify a country that has a 4,000-year history as emerging. It is not like they kind of popped out of the ocean, 'Hello I am here'. It is the one country where people who are literate can read the original text of the first written text in Chinese in the original version. They might not understand every Kanji character, but they they can still read it. That is pretty impressive. That is why I have an issue with it.
So fast growth markets are top of mind of course. That is an area where HP is already pretty active, but wants to be way more active, which is why, by the way, when I go there and I do go out there on a rather frequent basis to the delight of my body, suffering from jet-lag, I never miss the opportunity to at least meet once with a group of partners. I went to India recently and spent two meetings with groups of partners, a cross-selection of all types of partners -- large, small, printer [partners]. I try to reach out to them all because they have a very important role to play in helping us be a much better company in these markets. And just to be sure that you understand what I mean by that it is not just being a reseller of something. That, of course, is very important and we love them for that. And they do a great job. But the other element of this is they have first-hand knowledge of what is going on in the market and they know customers and all kinds of things.
So it is also a feedback mechanism back to HP, telling us what we should do better and how we should align better so that we can actually cover these markets in a stronger way. I pick up a lot of things in these meetings. And so did the people engaged with them directly. We will be working with our channel partners to make them an even more integral part of our strategy in building up these fast-growth markets.
What do you think is the biggest misconception of you and what do you want your legacy to be here at HP
Let me put it this way. I just started so it is a little bit hard to talk about legacy except I really have the desire to make sure that HP is the world's best company. As I said to the senior leadership team the other day, the kind of company where you would want your children to work at.
How about the biggest misconception?
I know that many people in the channel were afraid that I was known to be direct sales [advocate], proprietary, get out of my way kind of a person. That is actually totally not true. Even at SAP where I did build the world's probably best direct sales force, it was hugely leveraged by channel partners, hugely leveraged. Without the channel partners SAP would have never become what it became. Not even close. So I have always worked with channel partners and if I could use this opportunity as I am talking to you, I want to convey the message again and again and again, I embrace channel partners in any language you would choose.
One of the big things partners are concerned about is will you be involved in account engagement like your predecessor was doing the CIO roundtables with partners and doing the e-mails to help them sell?
Yes. I am a sales guy at heart. I carried a [sales] bag. So I sympathize with these people. So they can call. And I told them that in all of our meetings. Here is my number. Here is my e-mail. If you need help call. So we will do whatever we need to do to help these guys sell.
What is the ideal culture you want for HP and its channel partners?
Customer centricity. It all boils down to customer centricity.
Any final thoughts for partners.
If they have any concern about what the message is just let me know. They should sleep soundly knowing that HP is committed [to them]. I will measure them though on performance.
