It is rather unusual to find a CEO who has any knowledge of philosophy and the history of ideas but Unni Krishna seems to have a solid grasp. And you are absolutely right about the "soul" of HP as having been spun off with Agilent. The problem is one of the scale of the technologies. The medical devices and instrumentation businesses are inherently small scale. In divisions of a few hundred people the HP culture can flourish. When HP got into larger scale businesses the functional silos and separation of people in space and time made it much more difficult. For a deeper look at the issues see my recent article: http://www.themontrealreview.com/2009/Post-Rational-Management.php