2 What are the potential dangers for organisations of losing their core values and mission? Hewlett Packard (HP) is the world’s leader in sales of personal computers, printers and computer servers, with revenue of $127 billion and $7 billion in earnings reported in 2011.

However, HP has been under siege, losing market share and facing declining margins

(Waters, 2012). HP’s CEO, Meg Whitman, has sought to revive the firm by reinstating the distinctive management approach that helped transform it from a small company in Silicon Valley to a technology giant defining the business culture of start-

ups.

HP’s founders, David Packard and William Hewlett, built the company based on an informal, non-

hierarchical culture. Packard elucidated the ‘HP way’ (Packard, 2007):

Early in the history of the company, while thinking about how a company like this should be managed, I kept getting back to one concept: If we could simply get everybody to agree on what our objectives were and to understand what we were trying to do, then we could turn everybody loose, and they would move along in a common direction.