HPE's CEO Climbed From Call Center to Corner Office. His Advice: Deliver

Antonio Neri, CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise since 2018, started his career in the mid-1990s answering phones in a Hewlett-Packard call center in Amsterdam. His advice for employees who want to get noticed is unglamorous: do what you promise, consistently.

Neri told Business Insider that delivering on commitments is where opportunity begins at work. For HR leaders, the message lands less as career folklore and more as a prompt to check whether internal mobility programs (the processes that move existing employees into new roles) actually reward demonstrated reliability — or merely reward visibility.

What does Neri actually advise?

Beyond doing the job he was hired to do, Neri said, ambitious employees should tell their manager where they want to be in three to five years. He frames the goal-setting conversation as a shared obligation rather than a one-sided request.

"Hold the manager accountable, but most importantly, hold yourself accountable, too, because it's a two-way street," Neri said.

That framing carries a direct implication for people-process design. If managers are to be held accountable for career conversations, organizations need to make those conversations structured, documented and reviewed — not left to the calendar's leftovers.

His second recommendation: ask for developmental opportunities, particularly stretch projects that expand an employee's network among colleagues and senior leaders. The point, he said, is not enrichment for its own sake. Visibility keeps employees on leaders' radar when new roles open.

Neri also counsels restraint once opportunities appear.

"Don't overdo it, but also don't be quiet behind the scenes," he said. "Speak when it's necessary and then listen most of the time."

And then the loop closes: "But again, it starts by delivering what you say you're going to do," Neri said.

Why Walmart's people chief agrees

Neri's guidance matches what Donna Morris, Walmart's chief people officer, told Business Insider in October. She looks for two traits in employees she promotes.

The first is mastery of the current role. Employees who get promoted quickly, she said, "are focused as much, if not more, on just being exceptional at what they're doing today." Neri's call-center-to-CEO arc is the same argument made biographical: he rose through the ranks at HP and later HPE before taking the top job in 2018, roughly two decades after picking up a headset in Amsterdam.

The second trait Morris cited is appetite. "Be the type of person that takes on over and above what's being expected of you," she said. "Be the person that asks, or provides, volunteerism for new ideas or new initiatives."

What this means for employers

Two CEOs' worth of advice converges on the same premise: promotion-worthy behavior is performance plus stated ambition plus stretch. Each element depends on the other, and each has a process owner inside HR.

Consider the practical questions the advice raises:

• If employees must volunteer their three-to-five-year goals, do managers have the training and time to receive them properly?
• If stretch projects build networks, are those assignments distributed transparently — or captured by whoever happens to be nearby?
• If reliability is the foundation, does the promotion criteria actually measure it?

Neri's own trajectory offers one concrete comparison: a call center agent in Amsterdam in the mid-1990s became CEO of a spun-off enterprise technology company in 2018. Internal mobility, in other words, is not an abstract program at HPE — it is the biography of the person running it.

The quiet closing note is the driest one. Neri's formula requires nothing elaborate: keep promises, say what you want, take on more, listen more than you speak. Whether most organizations can honestly say their promotion systems reward that sequence is a different question — and one HR owns.