Carles Farre, Division President at HP Solutions Hybrid Systems, Real Leadership
43m 42s
The discussion centers on HP's evolution and leadership under Carles Fare. HP maintains its core culture ("the HP Way") and belief in technology's positive role, but now prioritizes delivering integrated solutions and experiences over mere device access. As head of HP Solutions, Hybrid Systems, Fare's mission is to enable seamless productivity and human connection by providing integrated workplace technology (audio, video, hardware, and services) that minimizes friction, making tech ambient and intuitive. He emphasizes measuring the digital employee experience—quantifying factors like meeting setup time—to improve outcomes. HP's strategy targets distributed enterprises, offering outcome-based solutions that rationalize legacy tech stacks. Looking ahead, AI and sensors will enable smarter collaboration tools that automate tasks and enhance remote engagement. Fare advises leaders to balance business strategy with culture and intentional technology use to attract talent and empower people. His leadership is influenced by personal maxims, family, HP's values, and life-changing nonprofit work in Latin America, which underscored shared human aspirations and the importance of adaptability.
Without a good business strategy, you are not going to succeed. This is absolutely true. But you are not going to succeed either without a good culture. Welcome to Real Leadership, the show that cuts through the clutter to spotlight leaders who make move and process things in the real economy. This isn't about buzzwords or theories. It's about bold decisions, solving challenges and the strategies driving industries that matter. I'm Jim Weaver, CEO of the owner group. In every episode, we get real about what it takes to turn vision into action and obstacles into opportunities. Let's go. We're back. Today, we're joined by Carles Fare, a global business leader and longtime HP incorporated executive who currently serves as division president of HP solutions, hybrid systems. Carles began his HP career in 1999 as an operations engineer in Barcelona. From there, he advanced through leadership roles, spanning research and development, worldwide operations, and commercial go-to-market strategy, building deep expertise across both the technical and business sides of the organization. In 2020, he was named Vice President and General Manager of HP's page-wide industrial business, leading high-production inkjet systems, servicing industrial print markets. During his tenure, the business strengthened operational performance, improved profitability, and advanced a multi-year strategic growth plan. He later served as global head of print solutions, as well as global head of solutions execution for workforce solutions, leading HP's contractual printing business and expanding digital services for enterprise customers. In 2025, Carles became the division president of HP Solutions, Hybrid Systems. In this role, he leads a global portfolio focused on delivering integrated hardware, services, and digital solutions that help organizations enable the future of work. Having lived in five countries, Carles brings a global perspective and inclusive leadership style focused on building strong teams and aligning organizations around a clear vision. Welcome, sir. Thank you. Dean. That's your good idea with you. Yeah, I'm excited to dig in. You have such an interesting background and HP is such an interesting company. Let's start with HP. So, storage brand, everybody's familiar with the name. I've got a workstation in my office here across the way. But I don't know that people necessarily, as I got into this, I really don't know who HP is today. So, let's start there. Who or what is HP today? When you look at the speed, there are some things that are stay constant over the years and some things that are just about being as technology does. I'll stay with the things that stay constant until I'm very important. Number one, our culture. When we call the HP way, it's a way that we identify with ourselves. It's a day we convey ourselves in the market and among our peers and stakeholders. Two, the strong belief that with technology, we can make a positive impact in our stakeholder, society, customers, partners. And this is what moved us to year after year, technology, advancement, after technology, advancement to be on the forefront. That's what this is constant. Now, what is changing is what customers want. If you look maybe 10, 20 years, 30 years ago, it was about making technology accessible, democratizing technology access. As it became more ubiquitous and as people get more access to technology, I think now the emphasis is more into solutions and experience and outcomes. So, our customers, yes, they like technology, to some extent. But what is really large is to be able to be more productive, to have better outcomes, to be more fulfilled at work. And you became the division president of HP Solutions Hybrid Systems not too long ago. So, what is the mission of that division? How would you articulate that? We are in the world of communication and personal productivity. An easy way to imagine what we do is we follow a knowledge worker, a professional throughout the day. Stay in scene, we examine, connects with the headset, until being in the car, being at the office, being in a meeting room. All those experiences require audio, video, and productivity. And that's what we try to provide to our customers. Integrated workplace experiences. That's kind of the phrase that I see. Expand even more on that. Well, think about all the technology that takes place in the workplace. It can be your desk, it can be a meeting room. You are going to have a collection of PCs, and desk cameras, screens, BVRs, speakers. All these, by themselves, are assets, technology assets that provide the functionality, which we curve to our customers. But then on top of it, we build the right manageability, the right experience, so that all together provide, again, the right experience for productivity, and also for human connection. The core of what we are trying to do is making sure that people are as productive as possible. And they can enjoy work, and they can find 3% of what they do. I saw in my research, you stated that connection, and you just mentioned connection, will be a formal business metric. I thought that was really interesting. So how can one actually measure human connection quantitatively? Is that possible? Yeah, it is. And actually, it's starting to happen. I think you'll see more in the years of time. When we talk to our customers, mostly they tend to be EIOs or IT decision makers, the people that buy technology. If you look at them and what they were asked to do up until the last five years, it was mostly cost efficiency, and just keep a good enough ecosystem for your knowledge work, or that was in essence what they were asked to do. More and more companies have realized that a way to differentiate and to attract the best talent is through a great employee experience. So for the last five years or so, there is a new domain, that is called digital employee experience, that tries to improve and measure how an employee is, how a person like us is performing at work, which is the digital friction that the person experiences, and how we can remove this friction and convert into a great experience. I'll provide some easy examples. One is how much time does it take to connect, I'm in a meeting room today, how much time does it take to connect to a call, and which are the obstacles we have sometimes to get into the call and connect quickly. Another one can be, I have in office, open space, what a more open space is, and I want to just get to a desk and work, and maybe it's not my desk, my permanent desk, it's a desk, I have to use, how much time does it take to just get everything to work, how we can provide an experience, an experience where the devices talk to each other, and just by being too of me getting close to the desk, the things that won't wake up and work for me. So it's a concept where the technology, instead of being present, it's dissolving and fading away as you get into your workplace, and it's serving you so that you are focused on the desk at hand that you have. So you are looking to eliminate that, sort of seemingly obligatory five minutes of figuring out how do we connect with this remote meeting that we all go through, every time we're in a conference room. That's beautiful, man, that's the Lord's work right there. How are you going to market with this? Because I know with us, we've got a network of over a hundred branches, and we've sort of, our infrastructure just evolved over time. We're kind of like the frog and boiling water, how we arrived in some ways to where we're at today. So how are you going to market with this? I imagine you're targeting large enterprise business, and is there a typical entry point, or are you going for the full shoot and match right out of the gate? We can share every customer, our sweetest spot is in companies that have some sort of distribution or distributed environments like the one you are mentioning, and where we have some sort of managing environment. By managing ability, I mean there is an IT responsible that is managing the infrastructure or the employees. And the way we market is we are moving from selling nice devices. I mean, I can tell you we lot our devices because for the last 80 years, we have been very nice devices. But we have
>> Yeah. >> Moving from telling, you know, a text, you know, a speech and speech about our devices, and selling first understanding the customer means in terms of which are the outcomes, the customer won't achieve, and then which is the solution that is going to be a combination of hardware services software that we have to provide to meet those outcomes. And then also providing which are the tools that you need as an IT leader to manage this infrastructure that are for your employees. Because typically what you are describing is very common to many companies, which they have a patchwork of devices and configurations that have grown over the years, sometimes even through acquisitions. So we help rationalize all these indictments and provide again a solution to what we offer. >> Yeah, much more kind of big picture and result-oriented sale. That must be interesting. You've used the term ambient collaboration to describe tools that quietly dissolve barriers. One fascinating goal you mentioned is technology that will capture nonverbal signals, like engagement, alignment. How close are we to being in a world where that's, where I can actually feel the energy of a room that is not the room that I'm in, and like, what, how do we get there, what does that look like? >> We already lived there, but we're gonna be more immersed. That's my summary. I'll provide you examples. So today, in the month to come, we had more and more working in a collaboration room. Your video is gonna become your AI production editor. So you're gonna have a production team, but it's gonna be automatic. It's an AI engine. Then it's gonna be, imagine several cameras in a room, is gonna be capturing the best image of you. >> Yeah. >> So if I turn, there is gonna be another camera capturing me and offering to you the best possible shot without any addition, without any human present. Another example, we are working on a perimeter detection in a room. Why this is so important is because we are gonna be able in the near future to identify when you get into the room and we can write actions. For instance, we can say, Jim, I see you are in the room and in your calendar, you have this meeting. You will need to connect to this meeting. You might not disconnect from the meeting when you get out of the room. Then if you get out of the room, I can tell you, Jim, you seem to be outside the room. I'm gonna close the meeting, if you agree. So there is a lot of sensors that you have today and many more that we will have so that we can capture this ambient intelligence and then drive actions accordingly. >> Yeah, that makes sense. Instead of a kind of a static picture where we got the same camera angle and we're talking, you could, I can visualize what you're saying. Interesting. I've also heard you caution against devices that are kind of built for novelty rather than usability. There's a lot of cool stuff you can do that's maybe not real practical. So what out there right now, are you thinking, man, that's not gonna last? That's not gonna make it. Anything? >> I'm going to be inferred. I think that on the AI bubble that is some that will stick and some that will not. And devices as well, but I also want to be fair to the industry. I think there is a courage sometimes to bring devices and experiences that are a bit on the edge. But I'm also a believer of experimentation. You just need to be smart enough to say when you have to go back and do something else. But there are things that general diversity. I think to me, and this is very classic in technology, there was a time where we were inventing technology and then finding a market-free. And this has changed over the years. Now is you need to find the market and define the customer pain points first and then go back and design your technology. And this is especially important for technology lovers like my company. It's a bit of being humble and say, let's first really truly understand what are the customer spoken and spoken needs so that we can address them. That's just creating just cool toys. >> Yes, yes, beginning with the end in mind. So if you could give a piece of advice to a CIO trying to navigate the future of work in this current age, what would it be? >> Maybe because advice to a CIO, what a senior executive at my level is, your best asset is your people. And if you want to set yourself apart to your company, you need to have of course a great business strategy, but you need to have an strategy for your culture and strategy for your workforce. And we see it, you need to realize that the work is changing radically and generations that are coming up and into the workforce are very different than my generation or the generation of a senior are you could be talking to. So we need to connect the dots, the connect the dots in terms of work expectation, new generations, expectations. And what do we provide to them? So they can be the rest asset for our company and they can feel fulfilled at work and doing the best they can. And along these lines is how do we use technology for it? Each technology can be an ally, but we need to be very intentional and put the technology that we need so that again our workforce, our team can be as productive and also enjoy as much as they can. >> Recruiting top talent is top. >> Owning staffing focuses on people, offering exceptional benefits to attract and retain dedicated workers, partner with us for flexible data driven solutions, visit Owningstaffing.com to learn more. >> You have had a expansive career, spanning many roles in I guess five countries that was my count. Looking back, is there a leadership moment or experience that fundamentally shaped the way that you lead today? >> If I divide my life in the key moments for leadership, first I need to go back to my parents. And as I grew up, I realized how important they were. Maybe more than when it was young and I used to use them. They are still alive, I enjoy them a lot. It's a blessing. And I think they taught me by example more than words, the things that really matter and have become the fabric of some of my leadership principles. The two things I recall, I still try to stay loyal to is two things. Number one is do that as you can. You have to do the best you can in every single moment. With your family, with your work, with your extended family, with your friends, do your best. We have the same with my son of, I have to leave it, my oldest is 19. My son has continued the tradition and he is way to say this beyond the grind. That we are on the grind and this is true when we are in the gym, when we are biking, when we are studying, when we are working. In this sense of do that as you can at every single time in your life in every single chapter. And the second one, which is easy to say, that very difficult to execute is be a good person. My parents were always telling me be a good person, and again, with it comes a lot of responsibility. That this to me are two key principles I have tried to stay loyal to, which is do my best with intensity at every single point of time and be a good person. There is a second moment in my life, which is important is my wife. I don't know if she's going to listen to these or not, but she was very important to polish me. I was a bit of an unpolished person. And she she she held me around the you know around the Hs and and become a more balanced person as we got together, you know, more than 30 years ago. 31. Yeah, 30. Well, that's very good. Congratulations. Thank you. 25th class of my recent and so on feel before. Then I think HP, I was in HP twice. I need to explain it to you. It may be a story with this. Yes. I got into HP in 99. And as a young young engineer, without without too many of the appearances in the corporate world, getting into the culture of HP that I've mentioned before integrity, empowerment, ingenuity, technology advancement was a significant part of me as well as as a future leader. But then three years after I entered into HP, I left for five years and whether with my wife, we did something very different that what typical people do. Yeah, we went to we went to Latin America for for more than four years and we worked for nonprofits there. So we lived in several countries on Dura's Bolivia and Panama. And that was to me a life changing moment because you get in contact with a totally different reality. We we lived in many poor countries and spaces.
But we discovered another dimension of life, another, I would say a tiger connection with humanity that it changed me forever. I think it has changed me forever. I was going to ask about that because it was a bit of a left turn in your career. So tell us more about what you were doing there. All sorts of things. We were helping institutions in micro-micro-fans or micro-credits. So we were dealing with people that went at a loan of $100 or $50, 2, 3, 4, chicken or one cow. They were lucky. Or they had a small shop and they wanted to buy $200 worth of food to resell in a small village. We would be without roads, without electricity most of the time. We would be navigating rivers, riding horses, walking a lot, being village to commute between different villages. It was a very special moment in time. What took the scales to do that? You're young. You have no kids. It's a different world. I live in. We had some sort of inner will to try something different and to abandon the corporate or more than the beaten path. We wanted to do something different. We found that this was a way to help out others and to get to know Latin America. Initially, it was two years. We ended up doing four until my son was about to be born. We had to come back. What were a couple of key takeaways or maybe something that you changed your mind on having gone through that experience? There are so many. I would say the most permanent one is to discover how similar human beings are. I know it seems obvious. But when you live in Spain, you live in the US, you belong to political party or you follow the party or you work in a company, you create an identity. You are Spanish or an editor or style. You have your own identity. This identity comes with some goodness because it gives your sense of belonging. But sometimes it comes with isolation and it comes with distance. When you get into a totally different country and totally different people, very different social structure. At the beginning, wow, I don't belong here. But the more you let in contact with people, you realize that we as human beings at the end, we are all striding for the same. We want to be happy. We want our kids to be healthy. We want to have some level of work and stability. We want to be recognized by our community. We want to be able to help them as well. You just discovered another different manifestation of it. It is the basic human need and human aspiration. And that to me helped a lot because over the years, I believe or I want to believe that I became more open, flexible, adaptable. And everywhere, in the different countries I go, I try to discover the beauty of every country I am and truly enjoy what these countries bring to me. And now we're in the US for the last seven years. There is so much about the energy, the positivity, and the entrepreneurship that I am trying my kids to absorb. When we see the US and I can tell you, if every of my five countries, every country has two, three high things about just phenomenal that you need to learn. And say, yeah, yeah, I bet that shaped you quite a bit as a leader. And the other thing you learned is that you have a mission in life and everyone has to discover what it is. And in those environments, you are forced to do something for others. And at the end, our mission has something to do about doing something for someone else. And it can be as a leader in your company, with your team, with your family. But there is a calling. When in these environments, you tend to discover it faster because you are. There is less noise around you. You have to really roll up your sleeves and do something. But it's a reminder that we have a calling and we just need to follow it. You touched on a little bit earlier, but talk more about how you view the role of culture as it connects to an organization's success. I could say my answer to this question has changed significantly over the years. I am in my third decade of career and I can tell you it has changed significantly. At the beginning, I was looking at as a junior employee, I was looking at the culture of something written in the world. But there is a good set of norms. Again, I was very lucky with HP, very good structure culture, but it was static. And passive meaning is there, I have to follow, it's nice, but I have worked to do. I'm doing my work. Yeah, right. I'm doing the culture, right? As a young engineer, I was trying to solve technical issues. I was doing my work. Then second decade, you become a team leader, you have more responsibility. And then you start realizing that, oh, there is something here, right? By managing my team, by motivating them, by giving them support, we can do better. And you start realizing that it's not just technical things and business, but it's also your team and how important it is. But still is a bit isolated. I think now, in my last, on my third decade, when I became senior leader and managing big organizations, I realized that this is the bedrock of a business. It's just something interesting or important. It's story, the most important thing you have. It's a bit ironic because you have very important business challenges to address. I can tell you, yes, it's the case. You have to define your strategy. Yes, it's true. We have to find a strategy. And without a good business strategy, you are not going to succeed. And I think there are very good examples of companies where with a good, strong culture, you set yourself apart. And you create not only a great environment for people to strive, but also sustain differentiation and good business outcomes. That was Jim Collins' whole thesis in "Good to Great" on the HP way. It was held up as the gold standard of culture. It was built around a product. Originally, it was built around an environment, which is. So how today you're leading a large swath of that organization? How practically do you. Everybody talks about culture. But what are ways that you practically create that ecosystem or help to create. Or I don't know how you think about it, but how you ensure that you have that healthy ecosystem in your division there? I probably understand culture in different buckets, and that's how I plan to work to my team. And I think the first bucket, which is like the foundation of it, is about the human connection class and care. Class and care. You need to trust your colleagues, and you need to take care of them. Again, very basic. Human needs, that also take place in a company. Why this is important for two reasons. One, it gives you this fabric of trust, confidence and center of belonging. But number two, it also gives you excellent business outcomes. The speed of execution, the agility, that it comes when you have a trustful environment. So we work a lot with our team to make sure that we hold our self-accountable, to be honest, to be direct. To be trustful to each other, we do not avoid difficult conversations. They have to happen at business level, at people level, but we do it in a very trustful, careful, and respectful environment. The second block of culture that is very important is the customer. After being in more than seven different businesses, what gives us, as professionals, a lot of energy is being close to customers. And there is a peer-to-cycle that goes, starts with understanding the customer, being close to them, then trying to define a solution, bringing to the customer, keep learning, keep improving, and this goes on and on and on. So this customer's simplicity is to me also very, very fundamental to our culture. How do we bring it to life is we just spend time with customers, we just create for us and for my team to connect with our customers. And the third element or third block is about a culture of leadership. There is something I told my team all the time, they are tired of me, which is each of you is a leader of my organization, which has little to do with being a manager. Being a manager is a function, you manage a team, you manage whatever program.
Being a leader means that you wake up in the morning, you have a mission, you have empowerment, you have clarity and conviction, and your management is here to support you so that you can advance in your mission. And having an organization of six hundred plus leaders, as you can imagine, can become very powerful. And to do so, we need to be very, very careful on, are we really empowering our team? We as managers, are we having the right to support on distance? Distance whenever they can go alone, and support whenever they either need direction or they need us to remove a roadblock for them. I think a lot of folks can make the mistake of thinking empowerment means leaving somebody alone. And sometimes it is that, right? But I've come to think of it as empowerment being sort of, there's three elements to it. It's being clear about expectations, equipping and supporting the pursuit of those, and then accountability to those. That is, a lot of what you touched on there, the accountability piece, I heard you mentioned that, the customer's centrity, I heard you mentioned that, and you gotta have those things. I think a lot of times, focus on culture can create a soft culture where it becomes almost a narcissistic culture. If you don't have those elements, but yeah, it sounds like you have all of those pieces working beautifully. If you have 600 leaders in your organization, that's solid. It's a constant pursue. Two things I have learned about culture and pro-euroly news. Right? It's number one. It's one of the things that take more time to change. Therefore, persistence and compicture is very important. It doesn't change overnight. You need to focus every single day. And you need to admit that you are going to make mistakes. I have made so many, Jim, that I would be embarrassed to confess some of them. But do you know what? The day has 24 hours. Do you want to wear? You say, yes, I mess it up. Tomorrow is a new day. You're going to do it better. It's a daily pursue of cultural excellence. And then also the realization that as a leader and as a senior leader, you own the culture. Again, going back to our mission as leaders, one of the things, of course, we need to lead very healthy businesses and leave them in good position for the next generation. But at the same level, we need to lead an organization that has the right culture and the strength in terms of culture for the new generation. I was thinking about something. You think you'd be in a good vantage point to help us think about this. So we're in the early stages of this AI revolution. In this era that we're in, how do healthy cultures need to adapt and evolve to maintain that health with this? We're in a time of great change right now. And in some ways there's this new intelligence emerging. So how do you think healthy cultures need to adapt and prepare for that? That's the one billion dollar questions. Probably we don't know enough right about our AI's vulnerability in the next year. My intuition is that it's a big transformation. We have gone through many technological transformation. Probably there's the biggest we have seen in many years. At the same time, there are some commonalities with other technology transformations we have lived. I believe number one, you have to be curious, up to date, understand how the AI can help you be more productive. I think there is that is power on AI to help us as human beings and companies to be more productive. And to just put our resources where they have more value. So we the humans are going to have more time and more quality time to do our things. To me, it is one of the promises of AI to deliver. At the same time, the risk is to lose a little bit about human connection and our human touch. So I think we will need to balance this AI for productivity, AI for outcomes. Not forget that at the end we are going to need this human connection, we are going to need these ways to collaborate and connect with each other. Modernization, integration, infrastructure, AI readiness, owning technology helps industrial IT leaders build momentum without the resume bloat or vendor babysitting. We deliver talent vetted by real subject matter experts, scoped project teams built for results and consulting from tech leaders who have done the work. Contract, contract to hire, direct hire or statement of work, we do what fits. Ready to move? So are we. Visit owningtechnology.com. I've read where you've mentioned AI freeing up time to four meaningful connections. So in your leadership, how has AI changed how you spend your time? Practically. I use a lot in my personal and professional lives. It's helping me so far with the more mundane type of activity. Going through research, going through external documents, summarizing. So it is becoming a activity assistant for my daily work and for my team. What it doesn't solve yet, maybe it will, soon, is help me in the most complex divisions you have in business. And I have tried, I have tried, but it is not yet there now in phenomenal, phenomenal tool to again help you with the external information market research. Competition analysis, everything that is public or publicly available. It's a great tool for us to go faster. And of course, it has many other aspects like coding that can be used. This is an interesting time to be a young person. You talked about your 19-year-old son. I have a couple that are in their 20s, early 20s, ones getting ready to graduate, a college, and one is early stages and then another in high school. So what's your advice to young people who are in their 20s, in college or early in their careers? There's a lot of jobs that have been traditionally looked at as money. Like solid jobs. Go into this, that is question whether it will be valued in the future. It's kind of hard to know. So how are you coaching your son? And what would you say to our young 20s, some things, listening how they should be thinking about their career and their future? It reminds me when we talk to my son and you talk to yours, it reminds me what I was at that age and we were using a PC for the first time, right? And I were that mom had never used it and you tried to explain what you can do with a PC. And they know that it's coming. They know that it's something called computer. They don't really can't, they don't grasp what's the potential. I feel that they are the next generation or the young generation knows now so much of what's the potential that technology can do for them. And you see how they go through studies and through work, how quickly they progress or come progress now. That is to me is first realized the power of what you have in your hands. It can do a lot for you. At the same time as any technology advancement, if it moves up the threshold of commodity. So things before the computer were very hard, it become very easy with a computer. Things that were hard before AI like coding now become very easy. Therefore, there is going to be a reshaping and there is starting to be a redefinition of the shops. This new generation are going to be working alongside AI agents that are going to be helping them to their job. So their job has to evolve. Number one, they need to understand very well how to use that these adjacent AI capabilities. Number two, they have to prepare for jobs that don't even exist today, but they can have an intuition how they're going to become. And therefore, they also need to be my advice, be very flexible and learn many, many different things that help you around you as a professional. Number four, that's an advice I keep to myself is try to learn things that are not just your job. I think we, and this is a bit counterintuitive. Sometimes we believe that we just need to learn AI to become better at AI. And that's true, right? There are a lot of things to learn about AI. But to be a good professional, you also need to have a broad experience in life. And this comes with curiosity and I've been able to learn many, many, many different things. But then it's helped you connect the dots and be mentally more open to new things. What advice are you give to your kids? I very much along those lines. I think also the most human things we do.
Those will be the things that can't be replaced. So, you know, operating functioning in the physical world, live performance. I have one of my sons is a trainer. He's an exercise science guy. And I'm like, man, that's a really good. If people have more time in their hands and you have time to do things in the physical world now and hobbies, you're going to need folks that keep you in the game. So I think those types of opportunities are interesting. But, yeah, staying curious and open-minded right now is really critical. More critical than ever. I like the idea of being on the front edge, but also being knowledgeable in the things that have been, have worked in, you know, human nature anchoring in things that have been around for millennia as well. Like, if you can combine that sort of foundational, truly human-proven thing, like a broad base of that combined with being able to operate in the leading edge, I think that's probably a good combination. But I don't know, maybe I'm waxing too philosophical right now, but that's kind of how I think about it. There are things you, the half-developed as a leader. As you have said, I've seen there for millennia, for instance, how do you take decisions? Which is the criteria that I do and take it to the situation now. The decisions are going to be different, but there is something about training your brain and having, you know, you know, a perspective so that you can take good decisions in business. How do you teach this? How do you learn this in life? That's a good question. Well, let's land it there. This has been very interesting. I appreciate your time. So you're doing a lot of really cool things in your organization there. How can folks connect on the business side and find out how to create this integrated environment that you're creating, and then also how can folks find out about work opportunities with HP. We can put in the show notes, but what's the best way to connect with you and your organization in those ways? Connecting with me, I believe, I believe, is probably the easiest way I'm pretty active there. You'll find me there. We have all the opportunities and I'll be happy to follow up with anyone that has interest in the company or in any part of my discussion today. Beautiful. Well, thank you so much. All the best to you, sir. What a great career. It's going to be fun to keep an eye on you as the years tick by here. See what kind of left turns you take. Like you did earlier in your career once the kids get out of the house. Maybe there's something in the mix for you. You're welcome. You're made this. All right. Sounds good. Thank you, Jim. Thank you guys. Thanks for listening. Until next time, keep it real. Thank you for listening. This podcast is powered by Onan, the staffing partner delivering real results for manufacturing, logistics, and food processing companies nationwide. To learn more, visit www.ongroup.com. Until next time, keep it real.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
HP's identity is rooted in its enduring culture (the "HP Way") and a belief in technology's positive impact, while its focus has shifted from democratizing technology access to delivering integrated solutions and experiences that enhance productivity and human connection.
As Division President of HP Solutions, Hybrid Systems, Carles Fare leads a portfolio aimed at providing seamless, integrated workplace experiences (combining hardware, software, and services) that follow a knowledge worker throughout their day, with the goal of making technology "dissolve" into the background to reduce friction.
A key business metric is evolving toward measuring and improving the digital employee experience, using data (e.g., time to connect to meetings, ease of desk setup) to quantify human connection and productivity, moving beyond mere cost efficiency.
The go-to-market strategy involves solving customer outcomes first, not just selling devices, by rationalizing existing technology patchworks in distributed enterprises and offering managed, integrated solutions.
Future collaboration tools will use ambient AI and sensors (e.g., smart cameras, perimeter detection) to automate meeting production and intuitively manage connections, enhancing remote presence and engagement.
Effective leadership and technology adoption must be people-centric, focusing on company culture, workforce expectations (especially newer generations), and intentional use of tech to enable employee fulfillment and performance, rather than novelty for its own sake.
Carles's leadership philosophy is shaped by personal principles ("do your best," "be a good person"), his wife's influence, HP's culture, and a transformative four-year nonprofit stint in Latin America, which taught him universal human aspirations and the value of openness and adaptability.
Summary:
The discussion centers on HP's evolution and leadership under Carles Fare. HP maintains its core culture ("the HP Way") and belief in technology's positive role, but now prioritizes delivering integrated solutions and experiences over mere device access. As head of HP Solutions, Hybrid Systems, Fare's mission is to enable seamless productivity and human connection by providing integrated workplace technology (audio, video, hardware, and services) that minimizes friction, making tech ambient and intuitive.
He emphasizes measuring the digital employee experience—quantifying factors like meeting setup time—to improve outcomes. HP's strategy targets distributed enterprises, offering outcome-based solutions that rationalize legacy tech stacks. Looking ahead, AI and sensors will enable smarter collaboration tools that automate tasks and enhance remote engagement.
Fare advises leaders to balance business strategy with culture and intentional technology use to attract talent and empower people. His leadership is influenced by personal maxims, family, HP's values, and life-changing nonprofit work in Latin America, which underscored shared human aspirations and the importance of adaptability.
FAQs
HP maintains a strong culture called 'the HP way' and believes technology can positively impact stakeholders and society. While historically focused on democratizing technology access, today HP emphasizes delivering solutions and experiences that improve productivity and outcomes for customers.
The division focuses on providing integrated workplace experiences for knowledge workers by delivering audio, video, and productivity solutions. Their goal is to ensure people are as productive as possible while enjoying their work through seamless technology integration.
Human connection can be measured through digital employee experience metrics, such as time taken to connect to meetings or set up workstations. The goal is to reduce digital friction and create technology that dissolves into the background, allowing employees to focus on their tasks.
Ambient collaboration involves tools that quietly dissolve barriers through sensors and AI. Examples include AI-powered video production that captures the best camera angles automatically and perimeter detection that triggers actions like joining or ending meetings based on user presence.
Focus on your people as your best asset. Develop both a business strategy and a workforce culture strategy that aligns with changing work expectations, especially for newer generations. Use technology intentionally to enhance productivity and employee fulfillment.
Two key principles are: always do your best with intensity in every aspect of life, and strive to be a good person. These were instilled by his parents and reinforced through diverse life experiences, including nonprofit work in Latin America.
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