When I joined HP in 2001 out of college, the first thing my boss had me do was read the book "The HP Way." It was by Dave Packard and outlined their history an

When I joined HP in 2001 out of college, the first thing my boss had me do was read the book "The HP Way." It was by Dave Packard and outlined their history and philosophy for doing business. My boss was an HP lifer and loved the HP culture and made all his direct reports read the book. Sadly, reading the book just made me realize what a different company I had joined since Carly's changes were soon felt through the organization. Even more so when HP merged with Compaq and instilled their Texan-style top-down management approach and booted out the more distributed and democratic approaches towards innovation and decision making. I finally left in 2006 when the Compaq IT management started forcing all IT employees to move to Houston or Palo Alto (I had just moved to Chicago).