Enrique Lores joined HP in 1989 as an intern. At the time, HP held a program to bring European students to the U.S. When Lores’ summer internship ended, the company informed him that it planned to open another center in Spain, and given that he was from the country, HP extended him a full-time offer. “I thought it would be cool to do for a couple of years,” Lores told me. Thirty-five years later, he’s still there. But now, he’s CEO.
Reflecting on his 3½ decades at the Palo Alto-based tech company, Lores says a combination of growth factors contributed to his long-term stay at HP—namely, the prevalence of professional development opportunities. “I was changing jobs almost every two years. And when you change jobs, even in a big company, it’s like going to a different company and learning new skills,” Lores said.
He began in research and development, then marketing, operations, and sales. He moved from Spain to the U.S., then to Germany, then back to Spain. He began in HP’s digital processes unit and then moved to small printers, followed by PCs, and services. “The opportunities to learn inside the company were as big as the opportunities to learn if I was changing companies.”
Lores says repeatedly finding moments to learn and augment his overall skill set was a significant trigger shot to his career. What’s more, he noted that his long stint at the company proved advantageous because he profoundly understood the firm and had extensive institutional knowledge from watching HP evolve over the years. However, Lores caveats that teams and companies cannot be run as an island. “You need to connect and see what other companies are doing because there is always someone that is doing something better than you are, and you need to learn it.”
Although he acknowledges the role luck has played in his career—”You can be very smart or very good, but you also need to be lucky, and that’s a very important thing for all of us to accept”—he believes several vocational drivers helped direct him to the corner office. Of note, Hewlett-Packard’s 2015 split into HP and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Overseeing this effort gave Lores tremendous visibility into the company and how a business operates, he said. “When you drive a separation, it is like founding a company, and you need to recreate the regime, ranging from what IT systems we are going to have, what is going to be the legal structure, what is going to be the tax structure, what portfolio you’re going to build, what is your branding?” said Lores. “These are things that traditionally you only do when you are creating a small company, but I had the luxury of doing that at a mega company, and it was an incredible learning opportunity.”
Ruth Umoh
ruth.umoh@fortune.com
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Today’s newsletter was curated by Natalie McCormick.
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