With recent reorgs, I'm now working within the broader Consumer Services group. It seems despite the many delivery delays/issues, there is a pervasive Applause Only Culture where even any even valid debate/discussion is strongly discouraged.
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Truthfully, when I worked at HP, it's not that anyone was necessarily against some of the ideas I presented, but it was a matter of the lack of tools and resources at your disposal to help drive your ideas. At HP, I was constantly told, "Yeah that's a great idea! Let's follow up soon on it." Then a week later, I follow up and then I receive, "Well, I don't know if that's something we can do at this time."
Like one time, during COVID, I presented an idea for a partnership that could us accelerate our strategy for a particular technology that could increase productivity during COVID as everyone was working from home. Marketing thought it was a great idea, my manager thought it was a great idea. I reached out to a partnership manager at the other company. Things were going smoothy and then marketing just changed their minds. I get it could cost money, but it could have really put us further ahead of our competitors tenfold.
I think HP's issues lie deeply in being lazy and not wanting to do any risk assessments. If you look at their competitors, you will notice that they are the first ones to do something and then HP follows behind them. HP is NOT full of innovators but rather, followers of their competitors. As soon as you identify a pain point from our customers, the competitor just announced a solution for it. I can't tell you how many times this has happened to me. Why is that? Probably because HP's competitors have some dedicated some cash specifically for proactive market analytics. There have only been a small number of times where HP did something our competitors didn't do. But that only happens once every three years or so.
So yes, I would agree with your post here. HP is just full of high fives and has a recognition system that only serves to boost morale. There's absolutely no incentivization to think outside of the box. Oh cool, your VP put your name down on a list of people on a single slide during an all-hands meeting? Good for you, everyone will forget in a week.
And don't even get me started on HP's broken patent disclosure submission program. That's a whole other topic that has its own issues.
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