In praise of luck and hard work

When Elma Murphy was growing up on the family dairy farm in Ovens, Co Cork, she was surrounded by boys. The nearest neighbours had a family of four boys and Ms Murphy had four brothers of her own. "We played a lot of football and I believed anything they could do, I could do better."

This positive attitude and confidence has proved to be a valuable asset in Ms Murphy's career. For the past two years she has overseen the doubling of sales in her position as general manager of Hewlett-Packard Ireland. Although Ms Murphy was given the traditional housekeeping chores to do while her brothers worked outdoors, when it came to education her parents practised equal opportunity. She attended Mount Mercy secondary school in Bishopstown where the girls, were encouraged by the principal to study honours maths and science subjects.

"I was driven by the ethos of the school, which was very progressive at the time and went on to study Computer Science at UCC."

Leaving college in the mid-1980s was not a comfortable experience for most, but Ms Murphy had been working part-time for a small computer firm in Cork and was employed full-time when she completed her studies. Ms Murphy maintains that luck has always played a big part in her life. "It's in my nature to be the best that I can be in any given situation, but luck is the element that makes the difference."

After three years with Zentec Microsystems in Cork, mainly working in training, Ms Murphy moved to Dublin and into sales. She had been supporting sales people until then, but realised she had a preference and a flair for sales herself. "I stayed with the next company for 12 months but came back from my honeymoon to the news that they had gone out of business and I was out of a job. My boss actually took the call at my wedding reception but didn't have the heart to tell me."

Ms Murphy moved almost immediately into Hewlett-Packard where she has worked ever since. "I did essentially the same job for seven years but every year I was learning something new and progressing and I was enjoying myself."

Since joining Hewlett-Packard, Ms Murphy's home life changed considerably and she now has three boys aged four, eight and 10.

"I was lucky to have my children early, and extremely lucky to have the same wonderful childminder for the last 10 years.

"I learned early on that the only way I could work successfully was not to compromise on my time with the family. I often end up working 10 to 12-hour days, but not on the children's time. I'll take out my laptop at 9.30 or 10 o'clock in the evening and catch up then. I don't believe you can have it all but the main thing is to be happy with the choices that you've made."

Ms Murphy's rise to the top in Hewlett-Packard happened relatively quickly. She had been a sales manager for just 18 months when she was promoted to general manager. "They wanted somebody who wasn't afraid of how fast things were moving, and while I'm not reckless, I am certainly not cautious."

Hewlett-Packard saw comparatively flat results for several years in the 1990s, but the Republic was insulated from that as the market here enjoyed high sales growth. With new CEO Ms Carly Fiorina's arrival six months ago, the company is embarking on a major restructuring and reorganising programme. Ms Fiorina was the first outsider to be taken on in the top position in the company's 60 years' existence.

"A company that's not changing and restructuring in a dynamic marketplace won't survive. Our new CEO will change everything we do and how we do it and the company is an exciting place to be right now," Ms Murphy says.

Ms Murphy has already changed much of the workforce's operations in Blackrock, Co Dublin. She is a strong advocate of teleworking and introduced a system of mobile working and desk sharing that more than half the staff now take part in. "We used to look at the office and there would be rows and rows of empty desks around us but nowhere for new staff to sit. We undertook an analysis of desk usage as part of a worldwide Hewlett-Packard initiative and although it was a bit traumatic at first, we now have a great system for people to share desks effectively.

"Field-based people do not have to start the day in the office. They can handle their e-mail and calls from home and spend most of their time on the road with customers. When they arrive at the office, they log on to a phone and computer and can carry on from there."

Around 70 sales and engineering staff now operate without a permanent desk in Blackrock. Arrangements are made on a case-by-case basis and some staff have phone or ISDN lines installed in their homes.

Ms Murphy sees managing a local division of a global company as a very different role from managing an independent enterprise.

"You take another person's vision, add to it and implement it. It's a different set of skills which involves motivating people and bringing them with you."

However, she emphasises the importance of being able to switch off and keep the stress of work from interfering with home life. "It takes me two and a half minutes to make the break with work, which is as long as it takes me to go and collect the children."

A particular interest of Ms Murphy's is the development of the technology known as dynamic brokering. She believes that the next wave of the Web will involve it working for the user and not the user spending lots of time chasing information.

"We will see more changes in how we live over the next five years than we have over the previous 20. Companies think that all they have to do is get a Dot Com and everything is sorted, but having Hewlett-Packard's 120,000 suppliers worldwide on the Internet doesn't change the way we do business. We still communicate the same way, only through a different medium."

According to Ms Murphy, broker companies, using new software, will soon be trawling the Internet for companies and individuals and will then deliver the information and the best deal for a fee. So whether it's a large company looking to buy a fleet of company cars or a person searching for a cordless telephone, the new software and services will take all the click-work and time-consuming research out of the process.

Women are poorly represented at the top in the IT sector but for Ms Murphy equality begins in the home. Her career has always been as important as her husband's.

"When we had extra work commitments that clashed we would use an honest rating system. We'd both say how important the arrangement was on a scale of one to 10 and whoever was lower on the scale would stay at home with the children."