When Intel Chairman Andy Bryant stepped down from the chipmaker’s board this spring, his departure severed one of the last company’s last direct ties to its formative era under legendary CEO Andy Grove.
Once among Grove’s protégés, Bryant rose from a junior finance post to become Intel’s chief financial officer and then chief administrative officer. Capping nearly four decades at Intel, Bryant spent eight years leading the company’s boardroom.
As chairman, though, Bryant said he never sought to bind Intel to its heritage. Rather, he said it was his job to help the chipmaker move on.
“Old people tend to say, ‘Don’t bother me with new ideas. By God, I like the way it is,’ " said Bryant, in a new interview reflecting on his 39-year career at Intel. “That has to change.”
So Bryant said he sought to prepare Intel for the future with a new generation of leaders better suited to running a huge organization, and with a new, more “professional” culture to replace the hard edges and deliberate combativeness that Grove nurtured.
“I very much believe you have to always be refreshing,” Bryant said.
Long Intel’s top Oregon executive, Bryant is now beginning a quasi-retirement at age 70. He remains an adviser to the company’s top leadership, meeting at least once a month with CEO Bob Swan and more frequently with other executives. While he no longer has a leadership role, Bryant is consulting with each of its business groups to develop their product strategies.
And he’s watching closely as Intel grapples with a manufacturing crisis that cost company its cherished position at the leading edge of semiconductor technology, and more than $40 billion in market value. Rather than hunker down, Bryant said he looks to a new crop of Intel engineers to restore the company’s bold vision.
“You have to take risks and you have to push the envelope,” Bryant said. “And then you have to be prepared in case it doesn’t work.”
Raised in Harry Truman’s hometown of Independence, Missouri, Bryant joined Intel in 1981 after finance jobs with automakers Ford and Chrysler.
Intel transferred him to Oregon twice, and the second time Bryant refused to leave when Grove promoted him to CFO and sought to return him to corporate headquarters in Silicon Valley. Bryant became one of the most powerful and enduring executives in Intel’s 52-year history, working closely with six of the chipmaker’s seven CEOs.
In eight years as chairman, Bryant himself led the selection of Intel’s last two chiefs. Both hires were made on the fly.
CEO Paul Otellini retired unexpectedly in 2013. Then his successor, Brian Krzanich, quit abruptly in 2018 after the board uncovered what it called “a past consensual relationship with an Intel employee” in violation of corporate policy.
“Didn’t see it coming,” Bryant said. “Needless to say it created a long, difficult process.”
Intel took seven months to choose a replacement for Krzanich, ultimately settling on Bob Swan, the CFO who took over as interim CEO after Krzanich’s sudden exit. Bryant said the outcome of that extended search for a new CEO says a lot about his vision for the company.
“What we really had to do at the beginning was we had to decide what was important. Prioritize the needs, right?” Bryant said. “All of Intel’s past, we had said technology trumps everything. It has to be someone who was a technologist.”
Choosing Swan, Bryant said, was an acknowledgement that Intel had needed more than that. With more than 100,000 employees, and annual sales of more than $70 billion, he said the board choose Swan because it was convinced he had the skills to manage a business on that scale.
“Leadership was probably the more important trait. Bob’s an exceptional leader. You can get people who work for you who are the technological experts,” Bryant said. “It took us a while to come to that conclusion.”
There was something else Bryant says he was looking for. Grove nurtured a culture of “constructive confrontation,” which may have suited the business as it transitioned from being a scrappy, engineering-driven startup into the industry’s leader. But Bryant said that culture had degenerated into “aggressive confrontation.”
“When I was younger in my career I sometimes did that. If you’re talking about things I regret in my career, the thing (I regret) most is the way I treated some people. Because in the early days I was pretty rough,” Bryant said. “But you don’t have to do that. In fact, it gets in the way.”
With Swan, Bryant said Intel has a CEO with a disposition suited to the kind of company Intel needs to be.
“He’s a tremendous leader,” he said. “But he demands that his people carry themselves with dignity and respect for themselves and others.”
Choosing a professional manager over a technologist, though, presents another kind of challenge. While strategy and operations are vital, Intel’s success or failure ultimately hinges on its ability to deliver cutting-edge technology. And having Swan as CEO means that Intel must rely on his ability to choose the right engineers, and know whose technical strategy is the right one.
That’s never been more important than it is right now.
Intel finds itself in the unaccustomed position of lagging the industry leaders after a series of delays in its last three generations of chip technology. Most recently, Intel disclosed last month that work on its forthcoming 7-nanometer processor is a year behind schedule.
The company shed $42 billion in market value the day after it revealed the setback as investors renewed their doubts about Intel’s long-term technology prowess. It’s a historic lapse, and one that has severely diminished Intel. But Bryant said the company has played from behind before.
“We have had these things in our past and the company’s strength has always been fighting out of a hole. But each time you do it it’s a test of the character of the company,” Bryant said. “So this is the latest one. I do believe that the company will respond yet again.”
Intel attributed years of delays to its current, 10nm chip to having been too aggressive in planning advances to that generation of chip technology. Bryant, though, sees an underlying problem that is in some ways the opposite.
“The talent and the capability is still here. What we have to do is we have to take more risks than we take,” Bryant said.
“There are people who laugh at me when I say that, because taking more risks is what led to our stumble,” he said. “But you don’t get ahead by holding back on technology.”
Bryant recalled one of his last, in-person meeting with Intel engineers before the pandemic hit last spring. Intel’s next-generation development team was discussing its plan to catch up technologically. And while the group’s leader (whom Bryant would not name) appeared uncomfortable, Bryant said, younger engineers had full command of the issues and a clear path to overcome Intel’s setbacks.
“‘No doubt,’ they said, ‘we have this stuff, we’re being held back,’” Bryant recalled. “It was quite a bold statement, in front of the boss, to say we’re being held back. But by watching them you suddenly had the confidence we do still have the talent to solve this problem.”
The successive setbacks in Intel’s advanced manufacturing operations have prompted some Wall Street analysts and industry observers to suggest Intel should consider separating its chip development from its factories – perhaps by selling the factories altogether, or spinning them off to a separate company.
Intel has always maintained that integrated research and manufacturing enable it to move faster than its rivals, and to capture more of the profits. Intel told employees this month that its thinking hasn’t changed.
And neither has Bryant’s. He said the problem isn’t with Intel’s integrated business model, but with its execution.
“I do believe there are benefits to it,” he said. “I do believe we got somewhat disconnected. We can fix that. I think, still, manufacturing and process development are a foundational element of Intel’s advantage in the marketplace and we have to recover that. We just have to.”
That integrated research and manufacturing is central to Intel’s operations in Oregon. The company is Oregon’s largest corporate employer, with 21,000 people working at its labs, factories and corporate offices in Washington County – more than anywhere else the company operates.
Intel has brought some of the world’s smartest engineers to Oregon, Bryant said, and once they get here he said they – like him – are reluctant to leave. Intel is currently building a multibillion-dollar factory expansion in Hillsboro and Bryant said he expects Oregon will continue to play a central role for the company for the foreseeable future.
“We’ve watched…Oregon become more and more important to Intel every decade,” Bryant said. “I believe that needs to continue. I believe it will continue.”
-- Mike Rogoway | mrogoway@oregonian.com | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699
Subscribe to Oregonian/OregonLive newsletters and podcasts for the latest news and top stories.
"four" - Google News
August 30, 2020 at 09:33PM
https://ift.tt/2GbWVM9
Longtime Intel chairman Andy Bryant, near the end of four-decade career, says ‘We have to take more risks’ - OregonLive
"four" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2ZSDCx7
https://ift.tt/3fdGID3
No comments:
Post a Comment