(FORTUNE Magazine) – Nick Earle is not the sort of person that comes to mind at the mention of the words "corporate maverick." He doesn't sport any earrings. He's not 28 years old. And he doesn't bring a dog to work. But Earle is a maverick, or at least he has been charged with becoming one. Carly Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard's new CEO, plucked the 42-year-old Earle out of HP's marketing bureaucracy in November and told him to start as many new Internet businesses within the company as he could. To take HP's marketing message--e-services--and make it a reality.

Why? Because Carly (that's what most everyone inside and outside HP has taken to calling her) has herself been charged with reinvigorating HP, and she can't do it alone. She needs someone inside the company to be an agent of change.

Carly has done the usual things an incoming CEO does to get a company moving. She has slashed bloated operating costs, reorganized divisions, and changed the sales compensation plan. But those moves just set the stage. If HP is really going to change, the company needs the kind of new thinking that leads to new products, new services, and new ways of doing business. And that has to come from within the company, not from the top. Enter Mr. Earle, the maverick.

Earle now runs something new called the e-services.solutions group. It's one of only two groups that cut across all of HP's operating units. (The other is HP Labs.) This lets Earle wreak havoc--of the good sort--in all of HP's business units. Earle's primary job is to get HP's businesses to work in innovative ways with other companies to create Web services. He's also charged with building a keiretsu, or ecosystem, of Internet companies around HP.

Earle's role represents a revival of an HP tradition: embracing mavericks. The desktop printing group, HP's most successful business by far, was started by a maverick named Dick Hackborn, who set up shop in Boise to avoid becoming stymied by HP bureaucracy. (Hackborn became chairman of HP this month.) David Packard even gave a medal once, for "extraordinary contempt and defiance beyond the normal call of engineering duty," to a maverick named Chuck House. House had ignored orders from Packard to quit work on the development of a new display technology that later turned out to be a financial success.

Earle has a unique set of attributes for the job. Having worked at HP since 1982, he's steeped in the HP Way. Born in Liverpool, England, he is also one of the most charismatic and marketing-savvy executives at HP. As chief marketing officer for the enterprise computing group, Earle helped invent its innovative e-services marketing campaign.

While in that job he began playing an unofficial guerrilla role, spearheading Internet businesses within HP. In May he had a key role in negotiating a deal with Qwest Communications, the Denver telco. HP gave Qwest's new Internet-based application service provider business unit a load of computers in return for a share of the unit's revenues. Earle has even made a deal with watchmaker Swatch--to create an Internet-ready watch. He also helped create a package of HP hardware and third-party software that Internet service providers like Sprint resell to small and medium-sized businesses that are looking for a quick-and-dirty e-commerce setup. (HP gets a cut of each transaction.)

Carly wants Earle to do about one of these deals a week, with the ultimate goal of getting everyone at HP to start thinking along these lines. She has also given Earle as much as $150 million to invest in interesting Internet startups--the seeds, she hopes, of HP's first real keiretsu of companies.

Of the 120 people who will work in e-services.solutions, most will come from HP, but at least 25 to 30 of them will be from outside. Wooing outsiders will be tough, admits Earle. "You can't entice them with a 401(k) plan," he says. Instead, he will have to find a way to reward them with as much money as they could get working at a startup. One possibility is to create a phantom stock that tracks the performance of the unit but is distributed only to the unit's employees.

Earle isn't going to set up his new group in Boise, but he does plan to have his own building, away from the homogeneous HP campuses that dot Silicon Valley. Brimming with boyish charm and enthusiasm, Earle is reveling in his new mission as HP's e-vangelist. He adds: "We may even let employees bring in dogs."

This story first appeared in FORTUNE's online column Valley Talk. To subscribe, surf to www.fortune. com/technology/daily.

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