Bear in mind that Mr. Apotheker had already been paid “relocation benefits” of $4.6 million and a signing bonus of $4 million on Nov. 29 of last year, so his payments — almost $10 million after he signed on and just over $13 million to leave — would total at least $23 million for 11 months of work. An H.P. spokesperson declined comment on Mr. Apotheker’s contract, but said, “We credit Léo for having made important contributions to the company’s future. We appreciate his efforts and service to H.P.”

Compensation experts say that the primary argument for such lavish termination guarantees is to lure top executives from secure, highly paid positions elsewhere. “From the executive’s perspective, there’s a risk they may not meet the board’s expectations in an extraordinarily challenging business environment,” Mr. Delikat said. “They feel they should be compensated if the board determines they have not performed because they gave up a stable and highly paid position in a company where they had been successful. These top executives are the ‘A-Rods’ of corporate America. Everyone wants star talent. When they jump to a new team, they want what amounts to a ‘no cut’ provision, unless they are paid out on their contract.”

Mr. Delikat readily concedes that Mr. Apotheker may not have been an Alex Rodriguez, and “that the rationale may not apply to him,” since he’d been fired from his previous position as chief executive of the German software giant SAP (after just seven months). Mr. Donohue goes even further: “There’s absolutely no empirical support for the idea that people won’t move unless they get a lavish severance agreement. There may be some exceptional talents that need to be coaxed, but the idea that most executives need this is unbelievable. If you’re a top executive in Silicon Valley, to become the head of H.P., the largest computer company in the world, is a coup. You don’t need to be paid for failure.”

Most people strive to better their circumstances by taking chances, often changing jobs without any guarantees that should they fail, they’ll be paid anything — let alone lavishly. That, as Mr. Donohue points out, is the essence of capitalism. “Imagine if you were applying for a job, and you said, ‘I want to make it clear that if I do a terrible job, I want to walk away with a ton of money.’ Do you think you’d get hired? Yet that’s now standard practice in negotiating executive compensation.”

Can anything be done? To its credit, H.P.’s board seems to have learned a lesson. Its agreement with its newly named chief executive, Meg Whitman, calls only for payments of 1.5 times her annual salary and bonus if she is “involuntarily terminated without cause.” Oswald Grübel, who resigned as chief executive of the Swiss-based global bank UBS a week ago in the wake of a rogue trading scandal, not only accepted responsibility, but had the decency to walk away with a relatively modest termination payment of six months’ salary and some options valued at 1.5 million Swiss francs ($1.66 million) — no restricted stock, no bonuses and no accelerated payments.

But no one I spoke to held out any hope that others would emulate him, or that the system would change anytime soon. Clearly corporations and their boards aren’t doing anything; one of my colleagues at The Times, Eric Dash, reported this week on seven chief executives in addition to Mr. Apotheker who had recently left with multimillion-dollar severance packages.

“The system is a mess; it’s a joke,” the compensation expert Graef S. Crystal told me. Yet Congress has shown scant appetite for remedying even the most egregious practices.