Yet for all the detail work, one thing is clear: the need for speed. "We make quick decisions and get on with it," McKinney said.
Successful mergers, analysts say, are ones in which the combined company moves swiftly to make the decisions needed on products and personnel. The result, they say, is a hybrid enterprise, adopting complementary strengths from each company.
"Conceptually, this is a lot like planning a new company," said McKinney, who has started a handful of new businesses at Hewlett-Packard, including the home personal computer business in 1994, which remains a leader in the consumer segment of the PC market.
Before the vote, the proxy contest was compared to a presidential campaign, as both sides fought to win shareholder votes. Similarly, the job of McKinney and his colleagues can be thought of as much like that of the transition team for a new administration, in that moving quickly in the proverbial "first hundred days" will be crucial in setting the tone and establishing credibility for the new company.
"Out of the blocks, we have to move as fast as we can," said Barbara Braun, a senior manager for the Hewlett-Packard integration team.
To do that, McKinney said, the team has taken as one of its operating principles the need to make tough decisions instead of "trying to make everyone happy."
The companies are legally prevented from disclosing what those decisions are until the official shareholder vote count has been made. But according to members of the transition team, the decisions that have been made include what products will be promoted and supported most aggressively. A day or so after the merger is approved, the top 100 corporate customers of the combined company will be visited by Hewlett-Packard representatives with bound "play books" detailing the company's product plans and who the customer's account team will be.
The product lines no longer marked for continued investment, McKinney emphasized, will not be jettisoned immediately. For example, he said that Hewlett-Packard's standard service contracts routinely call for the company to continue supplying technical support for five years after a line is obsolete.
Still, a crucial element in the merger's success will be how convincing corporate customers find the Hewlett-Packard "migration path" from discontinued product lines to other offerings the company will feature. If customers do not go along and defect to competitors, the revenue loss for Hewlett-Packard could be far more than the 5 percent overall it expects.
The plan calls for savings of US$2.5 billion by the end of 2003 by trimming the payroll and closing distribution centers and factories.
The merger with Compaq is certain to be a force for further, often unsettling, change in the Hewlett-Packard corporate culture. Under Fiorina, the company has been centralized so markedly that internally this was called "the reinvention," with 83 product lines being consolidated to 17 and four separate sales organizations folded into one.
Now, Hewlett-Packard -- with its engineering culture that has emphasized deliberative, thorough decision-making -- is to combine with Compaq -- whose culture from the personal computer industry has emphasized fast decision-making and marketing.
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