Intel’s Culture Needed Fixing. Its C.E.O. Is Shaking Things Up.

Sadly, Intel's supposed culture overhaul has a really long way to go and the culture remains light years behind other tech companies.  Intel does not value innovation, collaboration across groups, ethics, diversity or laws.  As mentioned in this article, the previous CEO was forced out for violating the company policy prohibiting having a relationship with subordinates.  Yet, sexual harassment and retaliation are condoned by management and HR at Intel in 2020.  (I know because as an Intel employee my manager sexually harassed me.  So, I reported the manager for sexual harassment.  The manager was allowed to retaliate against me, bully me, and threaten me after he learned he was reported for the harassment.  When I reported his retaliation, Intel did nothing to the manager; Though additional managers protected the manager and joined in on the retaliation.)

Its not the '80s or '90s anymore. Designing, fabricating, software developing, and marketing enormously complicated products, top down, under 1 roof is no longer a viable business model. That trend has been shown to be true in basically every tech or tech-adjacent industry. Intel persisted through times when it would have been safer to shed or spin off the in-house fab business as a foundry.... which is still probably a good idea even with AMD's consistently better and cheaper products. That will not last forever. Everything AMD is doing is smart. Nothing Intel is doing is smart. Intel's rapidly evaporating crutch is their legacy of dominance and the specialization and optimization by many large enterprises in their hardware and proprietary technology (eg AVX512). Intel needs to act now, aggressively and quickly. Enterprise, financial, cloud, etc businesses are looking at AMD with absolute seriousness in ways they did not with their first Epycs. They are calculating the cost of transitioning over and prototyping to see if it makes sense. Perhaps even more dangerous: Every level from scientific down to game developers are determining how they should re-orient their resources to make their software optimized for both company's products, rather than largely treating AMD as an annoying after thought. That will, long term, eliminate the reliable buffer that has protected intel from periodically bad performance.

I worked for Intel. The big problem with Intel is Putney Swope's disease. Intel prospers by doing the same thing over and over faster and better than everyone else. While creativity is involved the organization itself is not very creative in terms of fundamental new ideas. Consequently, when someone does come up with an actual new idea, there is a mad dash to claim credit for it. The credit usually falls to a more senior individual who, in the process of claiming credit, pushes out the person whose actual idea it was. Within my first year of working there, I was at a meeting where senior management was handing out awards for a project that I had worked on, but not a major role myself. The person that did 90% of the work was away on maternity leave and not mentioned at all. The person credited for being the project leader had not worked on the project at all. From my experience, all very large American companies have this issue to some extent, people claiming responsibility for a thing they had little or nothing to do with. Intel has it to a debilitating degree which undermines their team building and new venture efforts. Their competition such as the more team-oriented Japanese and Korean companies generally don't have such issues or such issues to the extent I have seen.

Well written article. Fingers crossed for Intel to make those changes happen in the near future.

Very interesting article. I am a first-generation Intel alumnus who occasionally received Andy's legendary handwritten "Andygrams." The original Intel culture is a fond personal memory, but the "arrogance" was very noticeable even at that time. I am very encouraged to see Swan focus like a laser on culture.

The stakes are high.

The last company that I worked at, a large fabless semiconductor company, was a great supporter of innovation. There was no niche that was left out of the quest for expanding markets. TSMC was one of the fabs that we used. Intel stuck with their internal production only philosophy, a strategy that seemed out of date. In the meantime, I saw TSMC pulling ahead in smaller nanometer dimensions. Looking back, I can see that Intel's unwillingness to stop pushing the reduction of dimension and adherence to internal production as a liability to innovation. Smaller dimensions may have cost savings but for many application specific chips, the guts of the chips don't need those small dimensions. Many chips are "pad limited" which means that the overall dimensions of the chip which drive the cost are fixed by the pad ring where the wires are bonded. If a solution has a lot of external connections compared to the internal complexity, the benefits of smaller dimensions are lost. That many have stifled the development of markets that didn't need such smaller dimensions. During that time, I worked with some ex-Intel employees. They painted a picture of a monomaniacal corporation driven by a confrontational culture. They suppressed any divergent thinking that didn't fit their pursuit of big existing markets. If you weren't loud and aggressive, your voice was not heard.

I have competed with Intel. They are like an aircraft carrier- slow and difficult to change course. But once they are pointed in the right direction, the juggernauts momentum is unstoppable.

The new CEO wants to improve inter-team communications and collaborations? Does that mean that Intel will stop its practice of trimming the 'bottom 10%' of employees every cycle? Internal budget battles are really just a proxy to ensure ones own team/job/projects are not on the chopping block.

Intel is uniquely positioned in a dynamic technology industry with explosive cloud growth. If Swan gets the company rowing in the same direction with game changing product innovations firing on all cylinders, it can be another $1T company like Microsoft and Apple!!

I worked with Intel on a new technology and new business for them 12 years ago called Wimax. They would not go all in and would not cooperate with key industry players. Eventually, they just dropped the project leaving all their allies in the lurch. I learned to never trust Intel on anything other than CPUs.

There are very large companies that don't have cultural or teamwork problem. To keep an organization from being totally dysfunctional it not only take senior managers to drive the culture but managers and employee have to buy in. The bigger and more geographically dispersed a company is, the harder this is to do. From a technological standpoint we are starting to see the end of the "Moore's Law" period. It is getting increasingly more difficult to develop, build the manufacturing equipment and then get satisfactory manufacturing yields of chips below the 10-nanometer threshold. It may take another 10 or 20 years we will probably see integrated circuits that use photons instead of electricity used in these devices. That's going to open an entire new era of technical possibilities.

I was, am and will be, a big admirer of this company. They are a fantastic collection of highly educated and decent people. Compared to the challenges facing other large organizations, this new CEO has a great foundation to build on.

Good luck with that. In a bad culture, upper middle management is obsessed with its own control. The CEO holds a town hall, tells everyone to work together, the crowd yells "Go team" and then the svp goes back to his office and lets everyone know that none of that matters everybody needs to stay in line. The only way to change a culture is to do what Rome did to Carthage. Identify the entrenched bad actors and weed them out. A negligible share of companies are prepared to do that.

Sadly, very few employees trust the CEO or other executives. The NEO's have far more loyalty and concern for their hedge fund investors, and we've seen before how a concerned employee becomes a disgruntled employee and it's all downhill from there.

How interesting that this may be the first comment. It could be that no one wants to go on record about improvements for Intel because they don't want to risk their livelihood. Here in Oregon, it is a huge employer and getting bigger. There may be a sense of staying mum and letting the company sort itself out in order to not prejudice your chances of doing business with them. That's especially true for someone whose handle is his real name. But if Intel wants a bit of honest input and won't resent it, I'll just say that the long-encouraged team practice of canning a team member every year, often despite good performance is lamentable. Managers must rate their team members and no matter how satisfactory all may be, someone has to go to stimulate productivity, or keep fresh ideas flowing, or whatever. And no, I've never been let go from Intel.