Tim Brown, CEO, Nestle Waters North America

Most of my peers and I know about MBWA (management by walking around) from Tom Peters’ and Robert Waterman’s classic 1982 book, In Search of Excellence. Not too long ago, I learned the term originated at Hewlett-Packard in the 1970s, when Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard (who were insatiably curious, by the way) made it a practice to drop by employees’ workspaces to see what they were working on.