Yet whatever Mr. Hurd’s motives, it really wasn’t his responsibility to protect H.P.’s best interests, not once he was out the door. That duty falls to the board. And that is where the board failed dismally.

The central difficulty facing the H.P. board as it contemplated asking Mr. Hurd to leave is that California frowns on noncompete agreements. The board could ask him to sign a dozen trade secret agreements — as, indeed, it did — but it couldn’t legally prevent him from joining a competitor.

Over the years, this has become settled law in California: lawsuits aimed at preventing, say, a brilliant software engineer from joining a competitor have invariably failed. The concept of “inevitable disclosure” of trade secrets by such an employee — which has been upheld elsewhere — is a nonstarter in California.

In its lawsuit, H.P. avoided the phrase “inevitable disclosure,” relying instead on something it calls “threatened misappropriation.” But it’s the same thing, and it is likely to have the same result. Under California law, Mr. Hurd has every right to take his brain full of H.P.’s trade secrets and join Oracle. Pursuing the case is only going to embarrass H.P. (Then again, settling the case will probably be pretty embarrassing, too.)

Yet think about it: California has hundreds — nay, thousands — of companies. High-ranking executives, including C.E.O.’s, leave all the time. When is the last time you read about a case like this one — where a top executive walks across the street and joins a direct competitor a month later? It almost never happens. Why? Because most boards in California know how to keep it from happening, despite their inability to lock up an executive with a noncompete agreement.

Maybe those boards don’t hand the departing executive $12.2 million 30 days after the executive leaves. Maybe they don’t allow options to vest immediately. There are other ways as well to create a situation where an executive loses something of value if he goes to a competitor before a certain amount of time has passed. California employment lawyers tell me that such agreements are quite common.

And while it is true that $12.2 million is a drop in the bucket for someone as wealthy as Mr. Hurd, who made over $100 million in his five years at H.P., he also appears to be very motivated by money. The H.P. board could have at least tried to use money to keep him from jumping to a competitor. Or it could have tried to create a situation where Mr. Hurd would have something to lose by joining another big hardware company. Amazingly, the H.P. board did neither.