Dear Bob ...I think you're right on the money about community size, rules, trust and treating people fairly [from "Rights, privileges, fairness and equality," Keep the Joint Running, 5/5/2008 - Bob]. It's true that as groups get larger more rules and laws are required. Once people are able to be anonomyous many have no compunction about doing bad things to others. So we have to have laws and locks. Getting to th Dear Bob …I think you’re right on the money about community size, rules, trust and treating people fairly [from “Rights, privileges, fairness and equality,” Keep the Joint Running, 5/5/2008 – Bob]. It’s true that as groups get larger more rules and laws are required. Once people are able to be anonomyous many have no compunction about doing bad things to others. So we have to have laws and locks.Getting to the point, your comment that as companies get larger, progressively more rules are required because its hard to trust a stranger really got my attention. I’ll have worked at HP 19 years next week — long enough to remember the old HP and the HP Way. Certainly the way we used to do things had its faults, but what struck me about your comments was the fact that no matter how large the old HP got (and it was 100K+ employees) it was a company that operated on guidelines and trust, not rules.We trusted complete strangers to do the right thing because we all worked for HP. This was true right up until we started hiring outsiders who didn’t get that concept into senior management. They started creating rules and enforcing policies instead of guidelines. They didn’t get that we all trusted each other and that it was rare for someone to abuse that trust.Yes, we had our clock punchers and the guys who pushed their travel expenses to the very edge, but they were the exception, not the rule. I’m willing to bet you that more people break the rules now than ever bent the guidelines in the past. I’m not arguing with your premise one bit. I just think that Bill and Dave managed to create something really special that managed to become an exception to the rule that you have to put more rules in place as a company grows and I thought I’d share that observation.That place is gone now, as are most of the people that made it that way. It’s a shame.– HP Holdout Dear Holdout …I’ve wondered often about how the exceptions happen. Here’s my guess — let me know if you agree:It isn’t really that employees are willing to trust total strangers. It’s that employees are willing to trust the judgment of non-strangers (in the case of HP, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who made sure employees didn’t consider them to be strangers). In particular, employees trusted Hewlett and Packard’s judgment about the people they hired as executives, and by extension ended up trusting … or at least giving the benefit of the doubt … to just about everyone else in the company because of it.Maintaining that kind of culture of trust takes a lot of time and hard work. Clearly, it’s well worth the investment.– Bob Dear Bob …I think you’re right. We all trusted Bill and Dave and we all felt that we knew them. Everyone in the company who has met them readily shared their stories.No one had an unkind word (except maybe for Dave’s politics). We trusted their judgement and that they’d hire good people. We all assumed that each person in the chain would hire good people because they were hired by other good people. So, even though they were strangers to us we trusted that they were the kind if people we could trust. In addition, the company’s antibodies quickly rejected people who didn’t fit with the HP Way. Sometimes this wasn’t good as it pushed out people with new ideas, but mostly it pushed out hiring mistakes — people who couldn’t be trusted. It did take a lot of work to maintain but everyone was committed to maintaining it. It was a great culture and it’s what made HP such a successful, enduring company. Now its just like every other big company.– HP Holdout Technology Industry