Word: groves
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...years Grove enforced that narrow margin with a quick, violent temper--the polar opposite of his mentor, Moore. New employees at Intel suspected it was a management trick: Andy getting mad to get results. What they discovered was that the anger was real. Grove had an internal code of excellence, and when someone didn't live up to it, he hammered him. In 1984 FORTUNE named him one of America's toughest bosses. Sometimes even he recognized that he had gone too far. "After I cooled down, I apologized," he wrote of one '80s encounter that had him bellowing...
...merits of that no-b.s. culture became clear as the world around Intel began to crack. Starting in 1976, the firm sailed into one iceberg after another: weak demand for memory chips, factory problems, ruthless Japanese "dumping." In 1981, when Intel steamed into yet another exhausting chip slowdown, Grove decided that instead of laying off employees he'd order Intel's staff to work 25% harder--two hours a day, every day, for free. The "125% solution" turned Santa Clara into a sweatshop (a few particularly dyspeptic engineers took to wearing sweatbands to highlight the point), but Grove...
...released millions of flawed Pentium chips. The problem was small, an internal routing glitch that caused a mathematical error. Intel took solace from the fact that this occurred so infrequently that most users could leave their PCs on for years without running into a problem. Intel's hyper-rational, Grove-trained engineers told concerned callers not to worry unless they were planning to sweat some advanced astrophysics problems that weekend. The callers hung up and dialed CNN. And the New York Times. And the Wall Street Journal. Grove, who was on a Christmas ski trip at the time, was floored...
After a weekend conferring with his top advisers, Grove decided to switch courses, and on Monday, with typical Intel discipline, he turned the company around. By the middle of the next week, Intel had agreed to spend $475 million to replace Pentiums. The company even offered in-home service. It was, says Grove, "a difficult education." It also turned, perhaps, into a bonanza. Intel's name became better known than ever. And once the firm agreed to replace any chips, customers began to appreciate its commitment to getting things right...
...real message was simpler: confronted with another disaster, Intel had survived. Again. It was as if Grove's personality and the characteristics that had served him best over the years--courage in the face of fear, passion in the face of discomfort--had been transmitted like tiny electrons into the substrate of Intel's tens of thousands of employees. Grove had saved the chip. Next it was time to save himself...