Human Capital Briefs

Resentment, Jealousy, Feuds: A Look at Intel’s Founding Team

November 05, 2014

Over the course of a month I have published one book and completed another. The published book is a history of Intel Corporation, largely told through its three famous founders. The finished book, co-authored with an old friend (and current publisher of Forbes), deals with the emerging science of team-building and management. And at the intersection of the two lies an interesting – and I think illuminating — story.

As often happens when writing history, those things you think you know best turn out to be completely wrong. It’s said that when Philip Ziegler was writing a biography of Lord Mountbatten he grew so angry at his subject’s behavior that he kept a note on his desk that read: REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN.  A lot of historians and biographers have felt the same way about their subjects.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I can remember when Fairchild Semiconductor was at its peak in the mid-1960s – and when it blew up a few years later, scattering talented, budding entrepreneurs all over Santa Clara Valley, and created the modern Silicon Valley. Intel Corporation was the most famous of these start-ups, the most influential, and ultimately the most valuable. In time, it became – and remains, despite some bad strategic moves over the last decade — the world’s most important company (as I decided to subtitle the book).

Why? Because Intel is the great protector of Moore’s Law – devised by one of its founders – and that Law is the metronome of the modern world. Indeed, though it is often forgotten in our world of social networks and Big Data, the entire digital world also rests on Moore’s Law. If Intel were ever to put down its burden, the entire electronics age would quickly grind to a halt.

In the late 1970s, for the San Jose Mercury-News, I became the world’s first daily high-technology reporter. My beat was Silicon Valley – and, along with a very young Apple Computer, one of my first subjects was Intel Corp. By then, it was one of the hottest companies on the planet. I confess that I didn’t really like Intel then: too arrogant, too confidant of its engineering prowess, both humorless and relentless. The place was a pressure cooker, full of shouters and table-pounders. Even before I became a journalist, back in my Hewlett-Packard days, the husband of my secretary had had a heart attack at a required Sunday morning meeting at Intel. I decided then that this was a company I would keep at a distance.

Then there were the three founders. Gordon Moore – soft-spoken, affable but distant, the most empirical human being imaginable — and, thanks to his Law, a man who likely would be remembered for centuries after Silicon Valley is gone. Robert Noyce, warm and engaging, the most charismatic figure in Valley history (including even Steve Jobs, who worshipped him) — and not only one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the age, but a man with one of history’s greatest inventions (the integrated circuit) on his resume. Finally, Andy Grove, fiery and relentless, a small man with a gigantic personality, who could never endure losing, and who may have been the greatest CEO of the second half of the twentieth century.

My relationship with Intel during the quarter-century that followed had its ups and downs – mostly up when Noyce was in charge before his early death, and mostly down after Grove took over. Indeed, Andy refused to speak with me for a decade after I wrote something about Intel he didn’t like in The New York Times. But through it all, whatever my then-current feelings about the company, there were two things I firmly believed about Intel.

The first was that the company didn’t make mistakes; it was a machine that just moved forward, slowly grinding away to gain market share and ever-greater dominance over the semiconductor industry, the electronics industry, the U.S. economy, and eventually the global economy. That last goal was arguably accomplished at the turn of the century when the company owned the microprocessor business, enjoyed the highest market value of any manufacturing company in the world, and Andy Grove was declared Time’s “Man of the Year”. I held to this belief even in the face of the Pentium-bug scandal and investigations of Intel’s business practices by the Federal government.

Second, I always believed, despite interviewing them scores of times, that the three founders enjoyed working with each other, that they had a special chemistry among them that made them uniquely effective leaders, and that – like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard before them – they were not only workmates but best friends. Certainly Intel presented the trio this way, as did the three men whenever I spoke with them. And yet somehow I never noticed that, despite their nearly thirty years together, there was exactly one photo – itself a lesson in body language – of the three men together.

I should have known better on both counts. In my years of covering Silicon Valley, I’ve seen just two kinds of companies not making a lot of mistakes: the start-ups that make one big mistake and die; and the old, risk-averse companies that slide into business oblivion. Intel, I came to appreciate as I wrote its history, probably made more mistakes than any company in tech history. And that’s because it took more risks than any other company. It’s also because – the source of its success – Intel is better than any company in high-tech history at learning from its mistakes; at picking itself up, dusting itself off, and diving back into the fight.

As for that perfect trio … only now, with Noyce long dead and Grove and Moore retired, has it emerged that they were anything but harmonious. Indeed, their years together were marked by resentments, jealousies, feuds, and even threats to quit (most of these last by Grove towards Noyce). As a result, the story of their partnership is a lot more interesting. Indeed, so complex are the relationships among the members of the Intel “Trinity” – Noyce the elegant but aloof Father, Grove the brilliant but resentful Son, Moore (and his Law) the ethereal Holy Spirit – that you almost need one of Gordon’s sheets of graph paper to plot them out. Just when you think you understand the trio (as I thought I did up until my final interview with Grove) you learn something new that turns everything upside-down. The Intel Trinity must be considered one of the most successful teams in business history, yet it seems to violate all the laws of successful teams.

But does it? When Rich Karlgaard and I started on our teams book, we didn’t doubt the clichés about the keys to great teams: harmonious, common interests, the bigger the better. What we learned is that recent anthropological, sociological, and psychological research has shown just the opposite to be true. We learned that, in fact, the best teams are as small as you can make them while still compiling the needed talent; that they are most effective when the greatest possible diversity exists in the way members think; and that friendship and harmony are often the biggest threats to team success.

In other words, the smaller and more diverse the team, the greater its chance of success – as long as you can keep it from blowing up. The founders of Intel were just such a diverse, volatile team, composed of three of the greatest business and scientific talents of the century. They succeeded not just in spite of their differences, but because of them. They perpetually found ways to work around each other (usually by working through the amiable Moore), and to goad each other to succeed. They also filled in each other’s blanks. Noyce, for example, wanted to be loved and couldn’t bear to fire even the worst employee. Grove by comparison did it with relish. Grove the table-pounder made sure Intel operated at peak performance, but it was Noyce the risk-taker who propelled it forward. Moore seemed to float above it all, yet kept the company grounded to the harsh reality of the numbers.

Most of all, the three found a common purpose – Intel – that held them together during the worst times; and they discovered a purpose – the maintenance of Moore’s Law – that gave their work an even greater purpose.

So, while Noyce, Moore, and Grove may have violated everything we believe about successful teams, they were in fact the very embodiment of what makes for a successful team in the real world. It can be tempting to look away from or paint over these unappealing truths – as so many of us did with the Intel Trinity for a half-century. It’s more valuable to take a clear-eyed and closer look.

 

This blog first appeared on Harvard Business Review on 07/21/2014.

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