Intel’s Need to Change
by Miki Saxon
A couple of years ago I wrote
A corporation isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people, with shared values, all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.
Lou Gerstner, who remade the culture at IBM, most famously said,
I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game.
The culture continued to change when Sam Palmisano took over.
…the biggest breakthroughs are a result of changing the business model and the processes and the culture.
Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer learned the hard way that culture can’t be changed by edict, whereas Satya Nadella’s approach succeeded.
Over the last year, 110,000 strong Intel has been changing under the leadership of Robert Swan, who considers the cultural change necessary for its survival.
Its culture badly needed an overhaul, and its 110,000 employees needed to confront issues more openly.
“If you have a problem, put it on the table,” said Mr. Swan, 59, who was promoted to the top job a year ago and has since embarked on a campaign to shake up the Silicon Valley giant.
His efforts remain a work in progress. But the changes — some of which lean on the precepts of Andrew S. Grove, the former Intel chief executive who coined the credo “Only the paranoid survive” — are Intel’s biggest attitude adjustment in decades.
The underlying cause is the same as Gerstner and Nadella faced at their companies: complacency.
Complacency, from years of dominating their markets, and silos, from internal distrust and myopic communications.
Intel was the same.
Intel also had deeply rooted problems reflecting its years of dominance, Mr. Swan said. Managers, complacent about competition, battled internally over budgets. Some of them hoarded information, he said.
These are the same problems that companies of all sizes face.
No matter how dominant times change and competitors can seize the day.
While success is often seen as a case of “us” vs. “them” it’s crucial to remember that “us” includes customers, partners and all parts of the company.
Image credit: Aaron Fulkerson
