Success Quote by William Redington Hewlett

Hewlett’s line punctures the boardroom fantasy that great companies run on “data” the way bridges run on physics. Business, he reminds us, is closer to weather than engineering: you’re never standing on bedrock, you’re reading patterns and placing bets. The phrasing matters. “Proceeds” is kinetic and procedural, not heroic; it suggests that the daily motion of commerce is built from assumptions that are good enough to move, not perfect enough to prove. And by pairing “beliefs” with “judgments of probabilities,” Hewlett collapses the false divide between gut and spreadsheets. Even the most quantified forecast is still a belief wearing a lab coat.

The intent is managerial realism, but the subtext is also moral: uncertainty isn’t a temporary inconvenience on the way to certainty; it’s the permanent condition of decision-making. That’s a quiet rebuke to executives who demand guarantees from teams, consultants, or markets themselves. In Hewlett’s worldview, the responsible leader isn’t the one who pretends to know, but the one who can act without the narcotic of certainty - and own the consequences.

Contextually, this fits the postwar corporate era Hewlett inhabited, when modern management, operations research, and early computing promised to tame volatility. His sentence reads like a check on that optimism, especially from someone who helped build a company (HP) synonymous with engineering precision. The irony is productive: even in a culture of measurement, the crucial moments hinge on probabilistic courage.