change - Barbara Waugh

Title: Worldwide Personnel Manager
Company: HP Labs
Location: Palo Alto, California
Age: 53

Barbara Waugh is a 14-year veteran of Hewlett-Packard. But she'll never be mistaken for the slightly geeky, pocket-protector-wearing engineer that many people associate with the "HP" way. Back in the 1960s, Waugh was a fiercely committed civil-rights activist who was involved in the Freedom Schools movement. She was part of a winning class-action antidiscrimination suit against the University of Chicago. She spent time as an actor in a socialist-feminist street-theater troupe. She even served for a night as a bodyguard for Angela Davis.

Make no mistake, though. Waugh is an HPer through and through. "This is the best place I've ever worked," she says, "including the women's center that I helped to develop" -- at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. In fact, as worldwide personnel manager for HP Labs, she now works with some of the most "HP people" at HP -- the 900 scientists and engineers and 300 support staffers who make up her division. A central research operation, with facilities in (among other places) Palo Alto, California, Bristol, England, and Tokyo, Japan, HP Labs is the centerpiece of HP's decades-long commitment to pioneering new technologies and commercializing new products. Waugh's official role is to run something called the World's Best Industrial Research Laboratory program (WBIRL). Her real role, though, is to work with others to update the HP way for new times and for a new generation of businesspeople.

Waugh hasn't abandoned any of her ideals -- or lost any of the fire in her belly. She's just championing those ideals, and finding that fire, in a different setting. "Why am I here?" she asks. "Where better to wage my battle than in one of the most powerful agents for change on the planet -- a giant company in a world where companies, even more than nations, shape the future? And where are we more likely to win the battle than in this company, which has kept a balance between profit and decency, and which has had such an enormous influence on other companies?"

By all accounts, Barbara Waugh is a singular agent for change inside Hewlett-Packard, a global giant with annual revenues of nearly $42 billion and with more than 127,000 employees. Says Joel Birnbaum, 60, director of HP Labs and senior vice president of R&D: "Barbara is a paradox -- an unlikely blend of the deeply spiritual and the perceptively rational. Her sensitivity to people's needs and her creative spirit produce unusual levels of trust and commitment from colleagues, and it often leads to startling results." What Waugh does inside HP Labs -- and, increasingly, throughout the entire company -- sounds familiar: She helps people in this huge, highly respected, and sometimes complacent organization to communicate more, to collaborate more, and to innovate more. And the way she does so is original and exciting. "I'm often introduced as being 'in charge' of change," she says. "I'm not in charge of anything. My role is to create mirrors that show the whole what the parts are doing -- through coffee talks and small meetings, through building a network, through bringing people together who have similar or complementary ideas."

Waugh makes change by making connections -- a process that she calls "amplifying the positive deviants." (When's the last time you saw that term in a reengineering manual?) "The '60s way of doing things," she says, "was to identify a very complicated organization, pick out its worst elements, and go after them. You'd attack them." Today she takes the opposite approach: "You seek out the positive deviants and support them. You feed them; you give them resources and visibility."

Steve Hummel, 40, a member of the technical staff at HP Labs, produces semiconductor crystals. He's a self-described "lab geek" -- and one of Waugh's positive deviants. "Big companies, by their very nature, try to get people to conform," he says. "They try to mold you into a robot. Barbara saves souls from conformity. She identifies and develops people who are willing to challenge the status quo."

Waugh's most recent campaign for change began five years ago, when Birnbaum asked her, "Why does no one out there consider HP Labs to be the best industrial research lab in the world?" He then suggested that Waugh meet with people from consulting firms to see if they could offer some answers. She did so -- and was horrified by the firms' canned responses and sky-high fees: "They wanted $300,000 for a 'needs assessment.' Then they wanted $1 million a year for three years, and to have up to 10 consultants at a time living with us. Was I missing something?"