Tandem Computers - Culture

Culture

Tandem was famous for its unique Silicon Valley company culture. Some of this was inherited from the "HP Way" created by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Some of it was formed in founder Treybig's business plan. And some just reflected Jimmy's egalitarian values and Texan personality. The goals of that culture were formalized in a "Tandem Philosophy" class for new employees in 1980 and refreshed in 1983:

• An employee-oriented workplace.
• Sustained profitability.
• High customer satisfaction.

Tandem's weekly beer busts were the most visible sign that this company was a bit different. These had keg beer, wine, soft drinks, popcorn, unshelled peanuts, and good conversation. Besides being fun, they encouraged employees of different groups and levels to mix and learn what others in the company needed. Jimmy was always present and accessible.

Many fast-growing tech companies with rising stock prices award stock options to top employees. But Tandem was unique in also granting 100 shares every year to absolutely every employee, no matter how lowly. Similarly, every United States employee was given a paid six-week sabbatical every four years, beyond generous regular vacation accruals.

Tandem experimented with new ways to keep the entire company aligned and feeling like a smaller company. This included monthly "First Friday" telecasts that were broadcast live worldwide over private satellite links. These were produced by an award-winning in-house Tandem television productions staff. While generally educational about some aspect of the company, the programs usually featured some member of the senior management team in a humorous way.

As a side effect of its worldwide networking of all corporate computers, Tandem was a very early implementer of a worldwide corporate email system. This helped a lot. But the sociology of this new medium required some debugging. In the first release, the reply button defaulted to sending to all Tandem employees worldwide. Besides being annoying and embarrassing, this soon led to flame wars between people who had never met and those flames were difficult to extinguish. Subsequent releases fixed that and added support for nonbusiness mail, classifieds, and special interest groups.

Another distinctive employee program was TOPS (Tandem Outstanding PerformerS). This award was given to the top 5% of employees annually; any employee could be nominated. Winners and their guest were treated to an all-expenses paid trip to resort locations such as Hawaii or Vail for several days of fun and team building with top management.

Satisfying customers with reliable systems and topnotch field support was just as important as these internal programs.

One quirk of Tandem was that its customers invariably delayed placing their orders for new or expanded systems until the last weeks of their fiscal quarter. So Tandem mastered the art of doing all its manufacturing and testing in those final two weeks. Exciting for awhile, but this made it difficult to manage parts inventory. And it just encouraged customers and salesmen to continue waiting to the last minutes.

Jimmy was clear that a satisfying workplace required continued strong growth. The Philosophy class included a very complicated 8-page flowchart that attempted to show how every part and aspect of the company was driven by and help drive rising revenues and stock prices. This all worked well up to Tandem's billion-dollar year. But eventually, Tandem's spectacular growth stagnated due to saturated markets, economic slowdowns, and the costs and limitations of the main product line.

As a nearly anonymous division within Compaq and now HP, Tandem's culture is now history.