When is a change really a strategic inflection point? Changes take place in business all the time. Some are minor, some are major. Some are transitory, some represent the beginning of a new era. They all need to be dealt with but they don’t all represent strategic inflection points.
How do you know what a certain set of changes represents? Put in another way, how can you tell the “signal” from the “noise”?
Some years ago, key technologists at IBM told their counterparts at Intel and other companies that the Japanese semiconductor manufacturers were investing in gigantic and extremely expensive facilities for manufacturing semiconductors with even finer features than could be accomplished by ordinary techniques. These facilities would use x-rays instead of ordinary light to define the features of a chip. According to the IBM people, the Japanese had more than a dozen of these plants under construction. They feared that the Japanese investment in x-ray technology represented a fundamental change in the way semiconductors were built, a change by which the American producers could be left behind once and for all. If they were right, the x-ray approach would represent a “10X” technology factor and lead to an inflection point that we might never recover from.
IBM considered these developments a very major danger and decided to invest in x-ray equipment in a big way. Our people took this news very seriously. IBM technologists were extremely competent and their perception of the threat was ominous. Nor were they alone in this view. Nevertheless, after studying the issue, the Intel technologists decided that x-ray techniques were fraught with problems and that they were not production-worthy. Most importantly, they felt that our current technology could evolve to achieve ever finer features well into the future.
The way IBM and Intel responded to the x-ray technology threat showed that one company deemed it “signal,” while the other classified it “noise.” We decided not to pursue the x-ray approach. (Ten years later, it appears that we were right. As of this time of writing, to my knowledge, neither IBM nor the Japanese manufacturers are planning to use x-ray technology in manufacturing any time soon.)
In this case, competent and serious-minded people came to a different set of conclusions about a given set of facts. This is not at all uncommon. There simply is no surefire formula by which you can decide if something is signal or noise. But because there is no surefire formula, every decision you make should be carefully scrutinized and reexamined as time passes. Ten years ago, we decided that x-ray technology was not a “10X” factor. However, we continued to watch it, looking to see if the threat grew, waned or stayed the same.
Think of the change in your environment, technological or otherwise, as a blip on your radar screen. You can’t tell what that blip represents at first but you keep watching radar scan after radar scan, looking to see if the object is approaching, what its speed is and what shape it takes as it comes closer. Even if it lingers on your periphery, you still keep an eye on it because its course and speed may change.
So it is with x-ray technology. It is on our radar screen and has been for years. Today, we still don’t think we need to invest in it. But a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, as we exhaust other means that are—for now—more cost-effective, the balance might shift and what we once correctly determined was noise might well emerge as a signal we had better pay heed to. These things are not cut and dried, and even if they were, things change. Therefore, you have to pay eternal attention to developments that could become a “10X” factor in your business.
As potential “10X” factors go, the x-ray technology issue was relatively simple. Technologists at IBM had one opinion, their counterparts at Intel had another. We did what our collective judgment indicated we should do.
Things get a lot more complicated when the differences of opinion are not just between ourselves and others but when we argue inside the company as well. The story of the ferocious “RISC” versus “CISC” debates (which continue to this day) provide a good example of such a situation. RISC and CISC are acronyms for arcane computer terms—Reduced Instruction Set Computing and Complex Instruction Set Computing. For our purposes, it’s enough to know that they describe two different ways of designing computers and, therefore, microprocessors.
The debate over their merits divided the computing industry and almost tore it apart. CISC was the older approach; RISC was a newer technique. CISC designs require a lot more transistors to achieve the same result that RISC chips can accomplish with fewer transistors.
Intel’s chips are based on the older CISC scheme. By the time other companies started to pursue RISC techniques in the late eighties, the then current Intel microprocessor, the 386, was on the market, and the next generation Intel microprocessor, the 486, was in development. The 486 was a higher-performance, more advanced version of the same architecture that we used in the 386; it ran the same software but it ran it better. This was an extremely important consideration at Intel; we were (and are) determined that all our new microprocessors would be compatible with the software our customers bought for their earlier microprocessors.
Some of our people took the position that the RISC approach represented a “10X” improvement, a level of improvement that in the hands of others could threaten our core business. So, to hedge our bets, we put a big effort into developing a high-performance microprocessor based on RISC technology.
This project had a major drawback, however. Even though the new RISC chip was faster and cheaper, it would have been incompatible with most of the software that was available in the marketplace. Compatibility of a product was—and still is—a big factor in making it popular; therefore the idea that we would come up with an incompatible chip was not an appealing one. To get under the management radar screen that guarded our compatibility dogma, the engineers and technical managers who believed RISC would be a better approach camouflaged their efforts and advocated developing their chip as an auxiliary one that would work with the 486. All along, of course, they were hoping that the power of their technology would propel their chip into a far more central role. In any event, the project proceeded and eventually gave birth to a new and very powerful microprocessor, the 1860.
We now had two very powerful chips that we were introducing at just about the same time: the 486, largely based on CISC technology and compatible with all the PC software, and the 1860, based on RISC technology, which was very fast but compatible with nothing. We didn’t know what to do. So we introduced both, figuring we’d let the marketplace decide.
However, things were not that simple. Supporting a microprocessor architecture with all the necessary computer-related products—software, sales and technical support—takes enormous resources. Even a company like Intel had to strain to do an adequate job with just one architecture. And now we had two different and competing efforts, each demanding more and more internal resources. Development projects have a tendency to want to grow like the proverbial mustard seed. The fight for resources and for marketing attention (for example, when meeting with the customer, which processor should we highlight?) led to internal debates that were fierce enough to tear apart our microprocessor organization. Meanwhile, our equivocation caused our customers to wonder what Intel really stood for, the 486 or the 1860?
I was watching these developments with growing unease. The issue concerned the heart of our company, the microprocessor business that we had put our faith in and repositioned the company around when we abandoned the memory business just a few years earlier. It didn’t involve factors that might or might not arise a decade from now, like x-ray technology; it demanded a decision immediately, and the decision was crucial. On the one hand, if the RISC trend represented a strategic inflection point and we didn’t take appropriate action, our life as a microprocessor leader would be very short. On the other hand, the 386’s fantastic momentum seemed sure to extend into the 486 and perhaps even to future generations of microprocessors. Should we abandon a good thing, which for now at least was a sure thing, and lower ourselves back down into a competitive battle with the other RISC architectures, a battle in which we had no particular advantage?
Although I have a technical background, it is not in computer science and I was not that comfortable with the architectural issues involved. To be sure, we had lots of people who had the right background but they had all split into warring camps, each camp 100 percent convinced of its own chip’s supremacy.
Meanwhile, our customers and other industry partners were not of one mind either. On the one hand, the CEO of Compaq, a major and very technically savvy customer of ours, leaned on us—on me, in particular—and encouraged us to put all our efforts into improving the performance of our older CISC line of microprocessors. He was convinced that the architecture had enough power in it to last the rest of the decade, and he was unhappy seeing us split our resources and spend lots of time and money on something that was of no use to Compaq. On the other hand, the key technology manager at Microsoft, the company that provided most of the software that our customers used in conjunction with our microprocessors, was encouraging us to move toward an “860 PC.” As the head of one of our European customers told me, “Andy, this is like the fashion business. We need something new.”
When the 486 was formally introduced, the reaction of the customer community was extremely positive. I remember sitting at the product introduction in Chicago with a virtual Who’s Who of the computer manufacturing world, all of whom showed up to announce their readiness to build 486-based computers, and thinking, “RISC or no RISC, how could we possibly not put all our efforts into supporting this momentum?” After this event, the debates were over and we refocused our efforts on the 486 and its successors.
Looking back at these debates six years after the fact, I shake my head about how I could have even considered walking away from our traditional technology that then had, and still has, phenomenal headroom and momentum. Today, in fact, the advantages of RISC technology over CISC technology are much smaller than they appeared then. Yet at that time we were seriously considering a major shift of resources.
Sometimes the event that signals a strategic inflection point is dramatically clear. I doubt that it required a lot of study to conclude that the Modified Final Judgment that led to the breakup of the old AT&T was a monumental event. It probably was also pretty clear that when the FDA was formed and the truth-in-labeling act was passed, the world of patent medicine changed once and for all. There was no question that these events represented key changes in the environment of the businesses that operated under their influence.
Most of the time it’s not like that. Most strategic inflection points, instead of coming in with a bang, approach on little cat feet. They are often not clear until you can look at the events in retrospect. Later, when you ask yourself when you first had an inkling that you were facing a strategic inflection point, your recollections are about a trivial sign hinting that the competitive dynamics had changed. In the earlier story about memories, Intel visitors to Japan came back with the report that Japanese businessmen who had previously been very respectful of us now seemed to look at us with a newfound derision. “Something changed, it’s different now,” people said when they returned from Japan. And this comment and observations like it heightened our awareness that a real change was upon us.
So how do you know whether a change signals a strategic inflection point?
Ask these questions to attempt to distinguish signal from noise:
The Cassandras in your organization are a consistently helpful element in recognizing strategic inflection points. As you might remember, Cassandra was the priestess who foretold the fall of Troy. Likewise, there are people who are quick to recognize impending change and cry out an early warning.
Although they can come from anywhere in the company, Cassandras are usually in middle management; often they work in the sales Organization. They usually know more about upcoming change than the senior management because they spend so much time “outdoors” where the winds of the real world blow in their faces. In other words, their genes have not been selected to achieve perfection in the old way.
Because they are on the front lines of the company, the Cassandras also feel more vulnerable to danger than do senior managers in their more or less bolstered corporate headquarters. Bad news has a much more immediate impact on them personally. Lost sales affect a salesperson’s commission, technology that never makes it to the marketplace disrupts an engineer’s career. Therefore, they take the warning signs more seriously.
The other night, I checked my electronic mailbox and found a message from our sales manager in charge of the Asia-Pacific region. He passed on some breaking news from his area that had to do with a potential competitive element. His story was a familiar enough scenario—and yet as he began to talk about the new item, his tone was quite concerned, almost scared. “I don’t mean to be an alarmist and I know that situations like this come up all the time but this one really concerns me …,” he wrote. He was in no position to suggest a course of action; he was just asking me to pay attention to this development and urging me to take it seriously.
My immediate reaction was to shrug off his news. I feel much safer back here in California than he does in “enemy territory.” But is my perspective the right one? Or is his? After all, being there doesn’t automatically make him right in his assessment. I could claim to have a better overall perspective on things. Yet I have learned to respect changes in the tone of messages from people in the field. I will watch further developments of this news item more carefully than I would have otherwise and, in fact, I have since decided to initiate a broader study of its potential implications.
You don’t have to seek these Cassandras out; if you are in management, they will find you. Like somebody who sells a product that he is passionate about, they will “sell” their concern to you with a passion. Don’t argue with them; even though it’s time-consuming, do your best to hear them out, to learn what they know and to understand why it affects them the way it does.
Classify the time you spend listening to them as an investment in learning what goes on at the distant periphery of your business, whether you think of distances in geographical or technological terms. Think of it this way: when spring comes, snow melts first at the periphery, because that’s where it’s most exposed. Factoring in the news from the periphery is an important contribution to the process of sorting out signal from noise.
There is a fine distinction here. When I say, “Learn what goes on at the periphery of your business,” it means something different than if I had said, “Learn what goes on in your business.” In the ordinary course of business, I talk with the general manager, with the sales manager, with the manufacturing manager. I learn from them what goes on in the business. But they will give me a perspective from a position that is not terribly far from my own. When I absorb news or information coming from people who are geographically distant or who are several levels below me in the organization, I will triangulate on business issues with their view, which comes from a completely different perspective. This will bring insights that I would not likely get from my ordinary contacts.
Of course, you can’t spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly.
Sometimes a Cassandra brings not tidings of a disaster but a new way of looking at things. During the height of Intel’s RISC versus CISC debate, when I was most confused, our chief technologist asked to see me. He sat down and methodically took me through his point of view while at the same time representing the other side’s argument in the most objective way that I heard. His knowledge and insights made up for my own lack of self-confidence and expertise in this area and helped me listen to the ongoing debates with a better grasp of what I was hearing. Although this encounter did not lead me to a firm position, it helped me form a framework in which to better evaluate everyone else’s arguments.
In the case of Intel’s exit from the memory business, how did Intel, the memory company, get to where only one factory out of eight was producing memory chips by the mid-1980s, making our exit from memories less cataclysmic? It got there by the autonomous actions of the finance and production planning people, who sat around painstakingly allocating wafer production capacity month by month, moving silicon wafers from products where they seemed wasteful—memories were the prime example of this—to other products which seemed to generate better margins, such as microprocessors. These people didn’t have the authority to get us out of memories but they had the authority to fine-tune the production allocation process by lots of little steps. Over the course of many months, their actions made it easier to eventually pull the plug on our memory participation.
Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. That’s what a properly motivated and intelligent middle manager will do with resources under his or her command. The resources can range from wafer allocation for a production planner to how a salesperson schedules his or her efforts and energy. Are these random actions on the part of middle management or are they strategy being formed and executed? To be sure, they don’t seem strategic at first glance but I think they are.
Helpful Cassandras are quick to notice the first signs of “10X” forces but those signs are often mixed in with symptoms of forces that might appear to be “10X” but aren’t. For instance, is the Internet really that big a deal? Are we going to do all our banking electronically? Is interactive television going to transform our lives? Are digital media going to transform the entertainment industry?
The first thing you should realize is that everybody with a gadget hawks and hypes it and consciously or unconsciously works double time to make their product as important as possible. Under the circumstances, it’s only natural to be suspicious and so you should be.
The second thing is that, when you explore these developments first hand, you’ll discover that mostly they aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. In the early days, getting from one place to another on the Internet took forever and when you got there, more often than not, you found a stale marketing brochure. Electronic banking is still a clumsy way to replace a stamp. And interactive television seems to have vanished even before the ink dried on the mega-announcements.
On the other hand, don’t shut off your radar screens and go on about your business, discounting everything even if at first it seems quite crummy. A danger in assessing the significance of changes lies in what I call the trap of the first version.
In 1984, when Apple introduced the Macintosh, I thought it was a ridiculous toy. Among other weaknesses I saw in it, it didn’t have a hard disk (at the time, all PCs already had one) and it was excruciatingly slow. Because of these two factors, the Mac’s graphical interface struck me as more of a nuisance than a significant advantage. The first implementation of the Mac blinded me to the far more important features that came with graphical interfaces, like the fact that they brought with them a uniformity for all the application programs that were based on them: You learned one and you learned them all. But I didn’t see through the problems of the first version to perceive the beauty of the technology that lay beneath them.
In 1991, when Apple started to talk about the hand-held computing devices called personal digital assistants, or PDAs, a lot of people both inside and outside Intel considered them a “10X” force capable of restructuring the PC industry. PDAs could do to PCs what PCs were doing to mainframes, many said. Not wanting to be blind to this possibility, we made a very substantial external investment and started a major internal effort to ensure that we would participate in any PDA wave in a big way. Then Apple’s Newton came out in 1993 and was promptly criticized for its failings.
What does this say about the PDA phenomenon? Is it less of a “10X” force because its first instantiation was disappointing? When you think about it, first versions of most things usually are. Lisa, the first commercial computer with a graphical user interface and the predecessor of the Mac, did not receive good acceptance. Neither did the first version of Windows, which was considered an inferior product for years—DOS with a pretty face, as many called it. Yet graphical user interfaces in general, and Windows in particular, have become “10X” forces shaping the industry.
My point is that you can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version. You need to draw on your experience. Perhaps you remember your reaction to the first PC you ever saw. It probably didn’t strike you as a revolutionary device. So it is with the Internet. Now, as you stare at your computer screen that’s connected to the Internet, waiting for a World Wide Web page to slowly materialize, let your imagination flow a bit. What might this experience be like if transmission speed doubled? Or better yet, if it were improved by “10X”? What might the content look like if professional editors rather than amateurs created it, not as a sideline but as their main occupation? You might extrapolate the evolution of this phenomenon by remembering how rapidly PCs evolved and improved.
As you consider this or any new device, your answer may be that, even if it were “10X” better, it wouldn’t interest you as a consumer. Even if a company actually supplied it, it wouldn’t change the silver bullet test and it wouldn’t rearrange your complementors. Life would go on as before, just with one more gadget.
But if your instincts suggest that a “10X” improvement could make this capability exciting or threatening, you may very well be looking at the beginning of what is going to be a strategic inflection point. Consequently, you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology.
The most important tool in identifying a particular development as a strategic inflection point is a broad and intensive debate. This debate should involve technical discussions (for example, is RISC inherently “10X” faster?), marketing discussions (is it a fashion fling or is it a business?) and considerations of strategic repercussions (how will it affect our microprocessor business if we make a dramatic move; how will it affect it if we don’t?).
The more complex the issues are, the more levels of management should be involved because people from different levels of management bring completely different points of view and expertise to the table, as well as different genetic makeups.
The debate should involve people outside the company, customers and partners who not only have different areas of expertise but also have different interests. They bring their own biases and their own interests into the picture (as Compaq’s CEO did when he urged us to continue with CISC development) but that’s okay: a business can succeed only if it serves the interests of outside parties as well.
This kind of debate is daunting because it takes a lot of time and a lot of intellectual ergs. It also takes a lot of guts; it takes courage to enter into a debate you may lose, in which weaknesses in your knowledge may be exposed and in which you may draw the disapproval of your coworkers for taking an unpopular viewpoint. Nevertheless, this comes with the territory and when it comes to identifying a strategic inflection point, unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.
If you are in senior management, don’t feel you’re being a wimp for taking the time to solicit the views, convictions and passions of the experts. No statues will be carved for corporate leaders who charge off on the wrong side of a complex decision. Take your time until the news you hear starts to repeat what you’ve already heard, and until a conviction builds up in your own gut.
If you are in middle management, don’t be a wimp. Don’t sit on the sidelines waiting for the senior people to make a decision so that later on you can criticize them over a beer—”My God, how could they be so dumb?” Your time for participating is now. You owe it to the company and you owe it to yourself. Don’t justify holding back by saying that you don’t know the answers; at times like this, nobody does. Give your most considered opinion and give it clearly and forcefully; your criterion for involvement should be that you’re heard and understood. Clearly, all sides cannot prevail in the debate but all opinions have value in shaping the right answer.
What if you are not in management at all? What if you are a salesperson, a computer architect or a technologist who manages no one? Should you leave the decisions to others? On the contrary, your firsthand knowledge eminently qualifies you as a know-how manager. As a potentially full-fledged participant in these debates, what you may miss in perspective and breadth you make up in the depth of your hands-on experience.
It is important to realize what the purpose of these debates is and what it isn’t. Don’t think for a moment that at the end of such debates all participants will arrive at a unanimous point of view. That’s naive. However, through the process of presenting their own opinions, the participants will refine their own arguments and facts so that they are in much clearer focus. Gradually all parties can cut through the murkiness that surrounds their arguments, clearly understand the issues and each other’s point of view. Debates are like the process through which a photographer sharpens the contrast when developing a print. The clearer images that result permit management to make a more informed—and more likely correct—call.
The point is, strategic inflection points are rarely clear. Well-informed and well-intentioned people will look at the same picture and assign dramatically different interpretations to it. So it is extraordinarily important to bring the intellectual power of all relevant parties to this sharpening process.
If the prospect of a vigorous debate scares you, it’s understandable. Lots of aspects of managing an organization through a strategic inflection point petrify the participants, senior management included. But inaction might lead to a bad result for your business and that should frighten you more than anything else.
Contemporary management doctrine suggests that you should approach any debate and argument with data in hand. It’s good advice. Altogether too often, people substitute opinions for facts and emotions for analysis.
But data are about the past, and strategic inflection points are about the future. By the time the data showed that the Japanese memory producers were becoming a major factor, we were in the midst of a fight for our survival.
At the risk of sounding frivolous, you have to know when to hold your data and when to fold ‘em. You have to know when to argue with data. Yet you have to be able to argue with the data when your experience and judgment suggest the emergence of a force that may be too small to show up in the analysis but has the potential to grow so big as to change the rules your business operates by. The point is, when dealing with emerging trends, you may very well have to go against rational extrapolation of data and rely instead on anecdotal observations and your instincts.
Constructively debating tough issues and getting somewhere is only possible when people can speak their minds without fear of punishment.
The quality guru W. Edwards Deming advocated stamping out fear in corporations. I have trouble with the simplemindedness of this dictum. The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.
How do we cultivate fear of losing in our employees? We can only do that if we feel it ourselves. If we fear that someday, any day, some development somewhere in our environment will change the rules of the game, our associates will sense and share that dread. They will be on the lookout. They will be constantly scanning their radar screens. This may bring a lot of spurious warnings of strategic inflection points that turn out to be false alarms, but it’s better to pay attention to these, to analyze them one at a time and make an effort to dispose of them, than to miss the significance of an environmental change that could damage your business forever.
It is fear that makes me scan my e-mail at the end of a long day, searching for problems: news of disgruntled customers, potential slippages in the development of a new product, rumors of unhappiness on the part of key employees. It is fear that every evening makes me read the trade press reports on competitors’ new developments and leads me to tear out particularly ominous articles to take to work for follow-up the next day. It is fear that gives me the will to listen to Cassandras when all I want to do is cry out, “Enough already, the sky isn’t falling,” and go home.
Simply put, fear can be the opposite of complacency. Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful. It is often found in companies that have honed the sort of skills that are perfect for their environment. But when their environment changes, these companies may be the slowest to respond properly. A good dose of fear of losing may help sharpen their survival instincts.
That’s why in a way I think that we at Intel were fortunate to have gone through the terrible times in 1985 and 1986 that I described in Chapter 5. Most of our managers still remember what it felt like to be on the losing side. Those memories make it easy to conjure up the lingering dread of a decline and generate the passion to stay out of it. It may sound strange but I’m convinced that the fear of repeating 1985 and 1986 has been an important ingredient in our success.
But if you are a middle manager you face an additional fear: the fear that when you bring bad tidings you will be punished, the fear that your management will not want to hear the bad news from the periphery. Fear that might keep you from voicing your real thoughts is poison. Almost nothing could be more detrimental to the well-being of the company.
If you are a senior manager, keep in mind that the key role of Cassandras is to call your attention to strategic inflection points, so under no circumstances should you ever “shoot the messenger,” nor should you allow any manager who works for you to do so.
I can’t stress this issue strongly enough. It takes many years of consistent conduct to eliminate fear of punishment as an inhibitor of strategic discussion. It takes only one incident to introduce it. News of this incident will spread through the organization like wildfire and shut everyone up.
Once an environment of fear takes over, it will lead to paralysis throughout the organization and cut off the flow of bad news from the periphery. An expert in market research once told me how at her company every layer of management between her and the chief executive watered down her fact-based research. “I don’t think they want to hear that” was the byword with which bad news was eliminated, bit by bit, data point by data point, as her information was advanced along the management chain. Senior management in this company didn’t have a chance. Bad news never reached them. This company has gone from greatness to real tough times. Watching them from the outside, it seemed that management didn’t have a clue as to what was happening to them. I firmly believe that their tradition of dealing with bad news was an integral part of their decline.
I have described how our Asia-Pacific sales manager and a key technologist came to see me with their warnings and/or perceptions. Both of them were long-term employees, self-confident and comfortable with Intel’s culture. They were results-oriented and familiar with constructive confrontation; they understood how these help us collectively to make better decisions and come to better solutions. They knew how we go about doing things and how we don’t—rules that you don’t find written down anywhere. Both overcame their hesitation and took what might be seen as a risk. One came to tell me a piece of news that he felt was a serious problem; it might have been a valid warning or he might have thought he was foolish to raise it but he knew he could mention his misgivings without fear of repercussion. The other could explain his views on RISC designs with the unstated premise of, “Hey, Grove, you’re out of your depth here, let me teach you a few things.”
From our inception on, we at Intel have worked very hard to break down the walls between those who possess knowledge power and those who possess organization power. The salesperson who knows his territory, the computer architect and engineer who are steeped in the latest technology possess knowledge power. The people who marshal or shuffle resources, set budgets, assign staff and remove them from projects possess organizational power. One is not better than the other in managing strategic change. Both of them need to give their best to guide the corporation to good strategic results. Ideally, each will respect the other for what he or she brings to the party and will not be intimidated by the other’s knowledge or position.
An environment like this is easy to describe but hard to create and maintain. Dramatic or symbolic moves do nothing. It requires living this culture, promoting constant collaborative exchanges between the holders of knowledge power and the holders of organizational power to create the best solutions in the interest of both. It requires rewarding those who take risks when pursuing their jobs. It requires making adherence to the values by which we operate part of the formal management performance process. And, as a last recourse, it requires parting ways with those who can’t find it in themselves to adapt. I think whatever success we have had in maintaining our culture has been instrumental in Intel’s success in surviving strategic inflection points.