The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 52

What Grove did not realize at the time, but came to understand later, was that effective management need not always come from having one strong leader. It can come from having the right combination of different talents at the top. Like a metallic alloy, if you get the right mix of elements the result can be strong. Years later, after Grove had learned to appreciate this, he read Peter Drucker’s The Practice of Management, which described the ideal chief executive as an outside person, an inside person, and a person of action. Grove realized that instead of being embodied in one person, such traits could exist in a leadership team. That was the case at Intel, Grove said, and he made copies of the chapter for Noyce and Moore. Noyce was the outside guy, Moore the inside, and Grove was the man of action.⁴⁰

Arthur Rock, who put together the funding for the trio and initially served as their board chair, understood the virtue of creating an executive team whose members complemented each other. He also noted a corollary: it was important that the trifecta become CEO in the order that they did. Noyce he described as “a visionary who knew how to inspire people and sell the company to others when it was getting off the ground.” Once that was done, Intel needed to be led by someone who could make it a pioneer in each new wave of technology, “and Gordon was such a brilliant scientist he knew how to drive the technology.” Then, when there were dozens of other companies competing, “we needed a hard-charging, no-nonsense manager who could focus on driving us as a business.” That was Grove.⁴¹

The Intel culture, which would permeate the culture of Silicon Valley, was a product of all three men. As might be expected in a congregation where Noyce was the minister, it was devoid of the trappings of hierarchy. There were no reserved parking places. Everyone, including Noyce and Moore, worked in similar cubicles. Michael Malone, a reporter, described visiting Intel to do an interview: “I couldn’t find Noyce. A secretary had to come out and lead me to his cubicle, because his cubicle was almost indistinguishable from all the other cubicles in this vast prairie dog town of cubicles.”⁴²

When one early employee wanted to see the company’s organization chart, Noyce made an X in the center of a page and then drew a bunch of other Xs around it, with lines leading to each. The employee was at the center, and the others were people he would be dealing with.⁴³ Noyce noticed that at East Coast companies the clerks and secretaries got little metal desks while those of top executives were expansive ones made of mahogany. So Noyce decided that he would work at a small gray aluminum desk, even as newly hired support staffers were given bigger wooden ones. His dented and scratched desk was near the center of the room, in open view, for everyone to see. It prevented anyone else from demanding some vestment of power. “There were no privileges anywhere,” recalled Ann Bowers, who was the personnel director and later married Noyce.^IV “We started a form of company culture that was completely different than anything had been before. It was a culture of meritocracy.”⁴⁴

It was also a culture of innovation. Noyce had a theory that he developed after bridling under the rigid hierarchy at Philco. The more open and unstructured a workplace, he believed, the faster new ideas would be sparked, disseminated, refined, and applied. “The idea is people should not have to go up through a chain of command,” said one of Intel’s engineers, Ted Hoff. “If you need to talk to a particular manager you go talk to him.”⁴⁵ As Tom Wolfe put it in his profile, “Noyce realized how much he detested the eastern corporate system of class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the CEOs and vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy.”

By avoiding a chain of command, both at Fairchild Semiconductor and then at Intel, Noyce empowered employees and forced them to be entrepreneurial. Even though Grove cringed when disputes went unresolved at meetings, Noyce was comfortable letting junior employees resolve problems rather than bucking them up to a higher layer of management that would tell them what to do. Responsibility was thrust on young engineers, who found themselves having to be innovators. Every now and then, a staffer might be unnerved by a tough problem. “He would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do,” Wolfe reported. “And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100 ampere eyes, listen, and say: ‘Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and you’ve got to consider C.’ Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: ‘But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey . . . it’s your ass.’?”

Instead of proposing plans to top management, Intel’s business units were entrusted to act as if they were their own little and agile company. Whenever there was a decision that required buy-in from other units, such as a new marketing plan or a change in a product strategy, the issue would not be bucked up to bosses for a decision. Instead an impromptu meeting would be convened to hash it out, or try to. Noyce liked meetings, and there were rooms set aside for whenever anyone felt the need to call one. At these meetings everyone was treated as an equal and could challenge the prevailing wisdom. Noyce was there not as a boss but as a pastor guiding them to make their own decisions. “This wasn’t a corporation,” Wolfe concluded. “It was a congregation.”⁴⁶

Noyce was a great leader because he was inspiring and smart, but he was not a great manager. “Bob operated on the principle that if you suggested to people what the right thing to do would be, they would be smart enough to pick it up and do it,” said Moore. “You didn’t have to worry about following up.”⁴⁷ Moore admitted that he was not much better: “I was never very eager to exert authority or be the boss either, which might mean we were too much alike.”⁴⁸

Such a management style needed someone to impose discipline. Early on at Intel, well before it was his turn in the lineup to become CEO, Grove helped institute some management techniques. He created a place where people were held accountable for sloppiness. Failures had consequences. “Andy would fire his own mother if she got in the way,” said one engineer. Another colleague explained that this was necessary in an organization headed by Noyce: “Bob really has to be a nice guy. It’s important for him to be liked. So somebody has to kick ass and take names. And Andy happens to be very good at that.”⁴⁹

Grove began to study and absorb the art of management as if it were the science of circuitry. He would later become a best-selling author of books with titles such as Only the Paranoid Survive and High Output Management. He did not try to impose a hierarchal command on what Noyce had wrought. Instead he helped to instill a culture that was driven, focused, and detail-aware, traits that would not naturally have arisen from Noyce’s laid-back, nonconfrontational style. His meetings were crisp and decisive, unlike those run by Noyce, where people tended to hang around as long as possible knowing that he was likely to tacitly assent to the last person who had his ear.

What saved Grove from seeming like a tyrant was that he was so irrepressible, which made him hard not to like. When he smiled, his eyes lit up. He had a pixielike charisma. With his Hungarian accent and goofy grin, he was by far the most colorful engineer in the valley. He succumbed to the dubious fashions of the early 1970s by attempting, in an immigrant geek manner worthy of a Saturday Night Live skit, to be groovy. He grew his sideburns long and his mustache droopy and wore open shirts with gold chains dangling over his chest hair. None of which hid the fact that he was a real engineer, one who had been a pioneer of the metal-oxide semiconductor transistor that became the workhorse of modern microchips.