Our recent take on the out of control HP boardroom investigation was that this was a prime example of project management gone bad. While bad project management didn't cause the crisis, it obviously exacerbated it.

VC Eric Risley put a fresh face on the issue by recalling some advice that his father, a retired GE executive and entrepreneur, passed him on the topic of corporate governance

Risley's dad cast the issue in the context of the corporate lifecycle. While a company is in startup phase, it's typically looking for "adult supervision" that's focused, not necessarily on governance, but on tactical matters like getting an experienced hand on operations and budgets. Governance becomes an objective once the company matures and is thrust onto a wider stage after going public.

Rewind back to a year ago, and the sense of shock that occurred as allegations emerged over Mercury, a company that sold IT governance tools, was having governance issues of its own. A year later, the shock has turned to numbness with revelations of options questions snaring heavyweights like Apple, BEA, Microsoft, Verisign and many others. Evidently, options gaming was far more prevalent across Silicon Valley than we thought.

Given Risley's dad's advice, maybe the fact that more tech firms are being caught in a wider net shouldn't be so surprising. Remember, this is a sector that values firms that preserve their entrepreneurial sprit. It's a quality that connotes organizations that remain highly agile, are non-bureaucratic, and retain the energy and appetite of a startup.

Obviously, being hungry is preferable to being stalled by inertia. But has our value system indirectly given short shrift to the qualities of transparency that are expected in a post-Enron world?

Tony Baer, principal of onStrategies, is a well-published IT analyst with over 15 years background studying implementation issues in enterprise systems, application development, data management, and business intelligence. Baer's commentaries and rants on the state of the IT market are available here.