|
Continued
Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next
Although Moore and Noyce remained at the top of Intel's corporate
ladder, Andrew Grove was the driving force behind the company's powerful expansion, having been named president and chief operating officer in 1979. Extraordinarily direct and hard-driving, Grove was nicknamed the "Prussian Genera1." He was known to keep a list of workers who arrived after 8 a.m., and in 1981,when the company was experiencing difficulties during the recession, he came up with the "125 percent solution." All professional employees were forced to clock in for fifty-hour weeks with no increase in pay.
But Grove was no mere taskmaster. He was an effective manager,
who thought a great deal about the optimal methods of organizing an
industrial and technological company. He developed an "output-oriented approach to management," which he described in his popular 1983 book, High Output Management. (For many years he also wrote a syndicated column on management called "One-on-One with Andy Grove.") In his view, output wasn't limited to engineers and factory workers; it reflected on every clerk and administrator as well. At Intel, employees were responsible not only to their boss but also to their colleagues. ". . . [Here] everybody writes down what they are going to do and reviews how they did it, how they did against those objectives, not to management, but to a peer group and management," Robert Noyce once explained.
Intel also tried to instill a team-based approach. Even the most
senior employees worked in open cubicles, rather than in offices. The office design emphasized another one of Grove's main goals: breaking down barriers and developing personal relationships between managers and employees. Similarly, Grove advocated that managers meet employees one-on-one, to gain and impart information, and create a sense of a shared corporate culture. "[The] main purpose is mutual teaching and exchange of information," he wrote.
Though Intel had remained true to its founders' determination not
to stymie creativity under layers of typical corporate bureaucracy, not everybody chose to remain with the company. Just as Grove, Moore, and Noyce had left a larger firm to seek their own fortunes, various senior members of Intel's research staff left Intel in the early 1980s to start companies such as Convergent Technologies and Seeq Technology.
Continued
Previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | Next
|