The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 51

Just in case someone desired a prospectus, Rock himself typed up a three-and-a-half-page sketch of the proposed company. It opened by describing Noyce and Moore and then gave a perfunctory three-sentence overview of the “transistor technologies” the company would develop. “Lawyers later screwed up venture investing by forcing us to write prospectus books that were so long and complex and carefully vetted that it’s a joke,” Rock complained later, pulling the pages out of his file cabinet. “All I had to tell people was that it was Noyce and Moore. They didn’t need to know much else.”³²

The first name that Noyce and Moore chose for their new company was NM Electronics, their initials. That was not very exciting. After many clunky suggestions—Electronic Solid State Computer Technology Corp. was one—they finally decided on Integrated Electronics Corp. That wasn’t very thrilling, either, but it had the virtue that it could be abridged—as Intel. That had a nice ring to it. It was smart and knowing, in many different ways.

THE INTEL WAY

Innovations come in a variety of guises. Most of those featured in this book are physical devices, such as the computer and the transistor, and related processes, such as programming, software, and networking. Also important are the innovations that produce new services, such as venture capital, and those that create organizational structures for research and development, such as Bell Labs. But this section is about a different type of creation. There arose at Intel an innovation that had almost as much of an impact on the digital age as any of these. It was the invention of a corporate culture and management style that was the antithesis of the hierarchical organization of East Coast companies.

The roots of this style, like much of what happened in Silicon Valley, were at Hewlett-Packard. During World War II, while Bill Hewlett was in the military, Dave Packard slept on a cot at the office many nights and managed three shifts of workers, many of them women. He realized, partly out of necessity, that it helped to give his workers flexible hours and plenty of leeway in determining how to accomplish their objectives. The management hierarchy was flattened. During the 1950s this approach merged with the casual lifestyle of California to create a culture that included Friday beer bashes, flexible hours, and stock options.³³

Robert Noyce took this culture to the next level. To understand him as a manager, it’s useful to recall that he was born and bred a Congregationalist. His father and both grandfathers were ministers of the dissenting denomination that had as its core creed the rejection of hierarchy and all of its trappings. The Puritans had purified the church of all pomp and levels of authority, even going as far as eliminating elevated pulpits, and those who spread this Nonconformist doctrine to the Great Plains, including the Congregationalists, were just as averse to hierarchical distinctions.

It also helps to remember that, from his early days as a student, Noyce loved madrigal singing. Every Wednesday evening he attended rehearsals of his twelve-voice group. Madrigals don’t rely on lead singers and soloists; the polyphonic songs weave multiple voices and melodies together, none of them dominant. “Your part depends on [the others’ and] it always supports the others,” Noyce once explained.³⁴

Gordon Moore was similarly unpretentious, nonauthoritarian, averse to confrontation, and uninterested in the trappings of power. They complemented each other well. Noyce was Mr. Outside; he could dazzle a client with the halo effect that had followed him since childhood. Moore, always temperate and thoughtful, liked being in the lab, and he knew how to lead engineers with subtle questions or (the sharpest arrow in his quiver) a studied silence. Noyce was great at strategic vision and seeing the big picture; Moore understood the details, particularly of the technology and engineering.

So they were perfect partners, except in one way: with their shared aversion to hierarchy and unwillingness to be bossy, neither was a decisive manager. Because of their desire to be liked, they were reluctant to be tough. They guided people but didn’t drive them. If there was a problem or, heaven forbid, a disagreement, they did not like to confront it. So they wouldn’t.

That’s where Andy Grove came in.

Grove, born Andras Grof in Budapest, did not come from a madrigal-singing Congregationalist background. He grew up Jewish in Central Europe as fascism was rising, learning brutal lessons about authority and power. When he was eight, the Nazis took over Hungary; his father was sent to a concentration camp, and Andras and his mother were forced to move into a special cramped apartment for Jews. When he went outside, he had to wear a yellow Star of David. One day when he got sick, his mother was able to convince a non-Jewish friend to bring some ingredients for soup, which led to the arrest of both his mother and the friend. After she was released, she and Andras assumed false identities while friends sheltered them. The family was reunited after the war, but then the communists took over. Grove decided, at age twenty, to flee across the border to Austria. As he wrote in his memoir, Swimming Across, “By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ Final Solution, the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint.”³⁵ It wasn’t like mowing lawns and singing in a small-town Iowa choir, and it did not instill genial mellowness.

Grove arrived in the United States a year later and, as he taught himself English, was able to graduate first in his class at City College of New York and then earn a PhD in chemical engineering from Berkeley. He joined Fairchild in 1963 right out of Berkeley, and in his spare time wrote a college textbook titled Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.

When Moore told him of his plans to leave Fairchild, Grove volunteered to come along. In fact, he almost forced himself on Moore. “I really respected him and wanted to go wherever he went,” Grove declared. He became the third person at Intel, serving as the director of engineering.

Grove had deep admiration for Moore’s technical skills but not his management style. That was understandable, given Moore’s aversion to confrontation and almost any aspect of management beyond proffering gentle advice. If there was a conflict, he would watch quietly from afar. “He is either constitutionally unable or simply unwilling to do what a manager has to do,” Grove said of Moore.³⁶ The feisty Grove, by contrast, felt that honest confrontation was not only a managerial duty but one of life’s invigorating spices, which as a hardened Hungarian he relished.

Grove was even more appalled by the management style of Noyce. At Fairchild he had simmered with fury when Noyce ignored the incompetence of one of his division heads, who showed up late and drunk at meetings. Thus he groaned when Moore said that his new venture would be in partnership with Noyce. “I told him that Bob was a better leader than Andy gave him credit for,” Moore said. “They just had different styles.”³⁷

Noyce and Grove got along socially better than they did professionally. They went with their families to Aspen, where Noyce helped Grove learn to ski and even buckled his boots for him. Nevertheless, Grove detected a detachment in Noyce that could be disconcerting: “He was the only person I can think of who was both aloof and charming.”³⁸ In addition, despite their weekend friendship, Grove found himself irritated and sometimes appalled by Noyce at the office. “I had nothing but unpleasant, discouraging dealings with him as I watched Bob manage a troubled company,” he recalled. “If two people argued and we all looked to him for a decision, he would put a pained look on his face and said something like, ‘Maybe you should work that out.’ More often he didn’t say that, he just changed the subject.”³⁹