Intel Leader Quotes

It occurs to me that I might be in the unprecedented position of being able to glean some intelligence on them. Despite what the gang leaders would have the rest of us believe, angel parts are always taken from dead or dying angels, I’m sure of it. What I would do with angel intel, I don’t know. But it can’t hurt to gain a little knowledge. Tell that to Adam and Eve.

One of the most profound responses to this exercise came out of a focus group I did with a group of leaders at West Point. One officer pushed me a little on “the accuracy of the intel” and kept asking, “You are 100 percent certain that this person is doing the best he can?” After I answered yes two or three times, the officer took a deep breath and said, “Then move the rock.” I was confused. “What do you mean by ‘move the rock’?” He shook his head. “I have to stop kicking the rock. I need to move it. It’s hurting both of us. He’s not the right person for this position, and there’s no amount of pushing or getting on him that’s going to change that. He needs to be reassigned to a position where he can make a contribution.” This doesn’t mean that we stop helping people set goals or that we stop expecting people to grow and change. It means that we stop respecting and evaluating people based on what we think they should accomplish, and start respecting them for who they are and holding them accountable for what they’re actually doing. It means that we stop loving people for who they could be and start loving them for who they are.

Even though the Internet provided a tool for virtual and distant collaborations, another lesson of digital-age innovation is that, now as in the past, physical proximity is beneficial. There is something special, as evidenced at Bell Labs, about meetings in the flesh, which cannot be replicated digitally. The founders of Intel created a sprawling, team-oriented open workspace where employees from Noyce on down all rubbed against one another. It was a model that became common in Silicon Valley. Predictions that digital tools would allow workers to telecommute were never fully realized. One of Marissa Mayer’s first acts as CEO of Yahoo! was to discourage the practice of working from home, rightly pointing out that “people are more collaborative and innovative when they’re together.” When Steve Jobs designed a new headquarters for Pixar, he obsessed over ways to structure the atrium, and even where to locate the bathrooms, so that serendipitous personal encounters would occur. Among his last creations was the plan for Apple’s new signature headquarters, a circle with rings of open workspaces surrounding a central courtyard. Throughout history the best leadership has come from teams that combined people with complementary styles. That was the case with the founding of the United States. The leaders included an icon of rectitude, George Washington; brilliant thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; men of vision and passion, including Samuel and John Adams; and a sage conciliator, Benjamin Franklin. Likewise, the founders of the ARPANET included visionaries such as Licklider, crisp decision-making engineers such as Larry Roberts, politically adroit people handlers such as Bob Taylor, and collaborative oarsmen such as Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Another key to fielding a great team is pairing visionaries, who can generate ideas, with operating managers, who can execute them. Visions without execution are hallucinations.31 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore were both visionaries, which is why it was important that their first hire at Intel was Andy Grove, who knew how to impose crisp management procedures, force people to focus, and get things done. Visionaries who lack such teams around them often go down in history as merely footnotes.

While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.

Frohman had long tried to cultivate a culture of disagreement and debate at Intel Israel, and he had hoped this ethos would infect Santa Clara. “The goal of a leader,” he said, “should be to maximize resistance—in the sense of encouraging disagreement and dissent. When an organization is in crisis, lack of resistance can itself be a big problem. It can mean that the change you are trying to create isn’t radical enough… or that the opposition has gone underground. If you aren’t even aware that the people in the organization disagree with you, then you are in trouble.

Frohman had long tried to cultivate a culture of disagreement and debate at Intel Israel, and he had hoped this ethos would infect Santa Clara. “The goal of a leader,” he said, “should be to maximize resistance—in the sense of encouraging disagreement and dissent. When an organization is in crisis, lack of resistance can itself be a big problem. It can mean that the change you are trying to create isn’t radical enough… or that the opposition has gone underground. If you aren’t even aware that the people in the organization disagree with you, then you are in trouble.” In

Andy Grove had a mantra at Intel that we borrowed to describe leadership at Apple: Listen, Challenge, Commit. A strong leader has the humility to listen, the confidence to challenge, and the wisdom to know when to quit arguing and to get on board.

Then Grove posed an interesting question to his partner: If we were kicked out of the company, what do you think the new CEO would do? Grove and Moore reasoned that a new leader would feel no emotional attachment to the declining memory-chip business and would probably leave it behind. So they did likewise, shifting Intel’s focus to microprocessors—which set the stage for remarkable growth in the years to follow.

Schools, corporations, and government facilities blessed with fam computers, high-speed modems and, most important, people familia enough to make them work were overtaken by the game-sometimes literally. Over the first weekend of Doom's release, computer networks slowed to a crawl from all the people playing and downloading the game. Eager gamers flooded America Online. "It was a mob scene the night Doom came out," said Debbie Rogers, forum leader of AOL game section. "If we weren't on the other side of a phone line, ther would have been bodily harm." Hours after the game was released, Carnegie-Mellon's compute systems administrator posted a notice online saying, "Since today's lease of Doom, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt.... . Computing Services asks that all Doom players please do not play Doom in network-mode. Use of Doom is network-mode causes serious degradation of performance for the > player's network and during this time of finals, network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who ar playing the game in network-mode. Again, please do not play Doom is network-mode." Intel banned the game after it found its system swamped. Tens A&M erased it from its computer servers. ...The once-dull PC now bursts with power.... For the first time, arcade games are hot on the PC... the floodgates are now open.

At the end of 1999 I was the editor of Time, and we made a somewhat offbeat decision to make Bezos our Person of the Year, even though he wasn’t a famous world leader or statesman. I had the theory that the people who affect our lives the most are often the people in business and technology who, at least early in their careers, aren’t often found on the front pages. For example, we had made Andy Grove of Intel the Person of the Year at the end of 1997 because I felt the explosion of the microchip was changing our society more than any prime minister or president or treasury secretary. But as the publication date of our Bezos issue neared in December 1999, the air was starting to go out of the dot.com bubble. I was worried—correctly—that internet stocks, such as Amazon, would start to collapse. So I asked the CEO of Time Inc., the very wise Don Logan, whether I was making a mistake by choosing Bezos and would look silly in years to come if the internet economy deflated. No, Don told me. “Stick with your choice. Jeff Bezos is not in the internet business. He’s in the customer-service business. He will be around for decades to come, well after people have forgotten all the dot.coms that are going to go bust.

Villalobos had always been eager to work in law enforcement. When he was in high school, he assembled a group of boys from all grade levels and invited them to his house every Wednesday. Villalobos’ club revolved around hunting down fugitives on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted list. He led weekly research presentations that narrowed the list down to felons who were suspected to be within fifty miles of their vicinity. Villalobos held exams for his club members, testing their knowledge on how to react if they caught a criminal. He also trained them to identify what the criminals looked like with certain disguises and how to predict their next crimes and behaviors. All the boys were into it. And they trusted their leader. The amateur intelligence squad never caught any top criminals but inadvertently located the whereabouts of several robbers and proudly shared their intel with their local police station.

You may be adopting an organizing principle you don’t understand. For example, Intel created a casual-dress standard to promote meritocracy. Its leaders believed the best idea should win, not the idea from the highest-ranking person in the fanciest suit.

Most Mondays, their visit to Ive would be followed by one to Avie and the team working on Apple’s new operating system, which would eventually be called OS X. The radical new operating system would be the flywheel of all the extraordinary developments that would follow over the next decade, from Apple’s suite of iLife applications, to iOS—the slimmed-down operating system that would give life to the iPhone and iPad—to the entirely new software industry that emerged to produce the millions of apps written for those devices. While Steve’s gadgets and computers drew the most attention, the software that made them go was every bit as important. Steve always said that Apple’s primary competitive advantage was that it created the whole widget: the finely tuned symbiosis between the hardware and the software together defined a superior user experience. In the PC world, hardware and software technologies came from different companies that didn’t always even get along, including IBM and the PC-clone manufacturers, Microsoft, and Intel.

Otellini, Intel’s CEO from 2005 to 2013, admitted he turned down the contract to build iPhone chips because he worried about the financial implications. A fixation on profit margins seeped deep into the firm—its hiring decisions, its product road maps, and its R&D processes. The company’s leaders were simply more focused on engineering the company’s balance sheet than its transistors. “It had the technology, it had the people,” one former finance executive at Intel reminisced. “It just

By 2008, storm clouds were gathering over Microsoft. PC shipments, the financial lifeblood of Microsoft, had leveled off. Meanwhile sales of Apple and Google smartphones and tablets were on the rise, producing growing revenues from search and online advertising that Microsoft hadn’t matched. Meanwhile, Amazon had quietly launched Amazon Web Services (AWS), establishing itself for years to come as a leader in the lucrative, rapidly growing cloud services business. The logic behind the advent of the cloud was simple and compelling. The PC Revolution of the 1980s, led by Microsoft, Intel, Apple, and others, had made computing accessible to homes and offices around the world. The 1990s had ushered in the client/server era to meet the needs of millions of users who wanted to share data over networks rather than on floppy disks. But the cost of maintaining servers in an ever-growing sea of data—and the advent of businesses like Amazon, Office 365, Google, and Facebook—simply outpaced the ability for servers to keep up. The emergence of cloud services fundamentally shifted the economics of computing. It standardized and pooled computing resources and automated maintenance tasks once done manually. It allowed for elastic scaling up or down on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis. Cloud providers invested in enormous data ​centers around the world and then rented them out at a lower cost per user. This was the Cloud Revolution. Amazon was one of the first to cash in with AWS. They figured out early on that the same cloud infrastructure they used to sell books, movies, and other retail items could be rented, like a time-share, to other businesses and startups at a much lower price than it would take for each company to build its own cloud. By June 2008, Amazon already had 180,000 developers building applications and services for their cloud platform. Microsoft did not yet have a commercially viable cloud platform. All of this spelled trouble for Microsoft. Even before the Great Recession of 2008, our stock had begun a downward slide. In a long-planned move, Bill Gates left the company that year to focus on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. But others were leaving, too. Among them, Kevin Johnson, president of the Windows and online services business, announced he would leave to become CEO of Juniper Networks. In their letter to shareholders that year, Bill and Steve Ballmer noted that Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, had been named the company’s new Chief Software Architect (Bill’s old title), reflecting the fact that a new generation of leaders was stepping up in areas like online advertising and search. There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field.