Not One To Mince WordsNot One To Mince Words

Szygenda hired Napier in 1997 as the first CIO at Delphi, GM's auto-parts business--part of a team of CIOs that Szygenda assembled when he began in the late 1990s to rebuild GM's IT, which for the previous 10 years had been run primarily by EDS, then owned by GM. It was a time of change that required many of the same skills of team-building and prioritizing that Napier would need at HP. "This was a time of transformation. The people I hired all came to GM to change an icon," Szygenda says.

Delphi at the time consisted of several companies and divisions, all with disparate and diverse systems and platforms. One of those companies was Delco Electronics, which at the time was one of the few Delphi businesses that had named a CIO, Gary Robertson. Napier essentially had to start from scratch, Robertson says, building one IT organization from across all the groups that made up Delphi. "Bob was very practical. He'd say, 'Let's get the job done.' He had a low tolerance of B.S. and bureaucracy," Robertson says. Napier also had a sense of humor that could take the edge off. "He'd have funny sayings that he used, like he'd called the guys on the executive teams 'the heavy breathers,'" Robertson says.

Indeed, while Fiorina would affectionately call Napier the "grumpy old man" of her executive team, it was his combination of directness, humor, and warmth that endeared him to his peers. "He'd hit you over the head with a two-by-four, but then make you laugh," she says.

Szygenda calls Napier's ability to bring people together one of his strongest legacies at GM, and later at Compaq and HP. "Had he had a terribly strong ego, there would've been clashes, and that would've been the last thing Compaq and HP needed," Szygenda says.

At Delphi, one of Napier's early missions was moving from many disparate systems to standardizing on SAP. That meant working closely with Michael Capellas, who was SAP's director of supply chain. Capellas was later hired as Compaq's CIO, and when he was named CEO, he recruited Napier as CIO.

And it was Capellas, now CEO of MCI, who broke the news to some of Napier's former colleagues that Napier had died. One of those calls was to Szygenda, who then received calls from about eight other people from outside of GM about it.

Robertson isn't surprised to hear that. "Bob had one of the largest networks of friends I had ever seen," he says. Napier, who is survived by his wife, Cheryl, and a daughter and two sons, also held onto ties built well before his corporate days. "He never missed a reunion with his Navy buddies," Fiorina says.

For Robertson, Napier's lasting legacy is the role of friend and, especially, mentor. Says Robertson, "He was truly one of the good guys."