Losing Faith: How the Grove Survivors Led the Decline of Intel's Corporate Culture

by Bob Coleman, Logan Shrine

What has happened to Andy Grove's Intel? A Wall Street Journal article dated November 1, 2006 stated that Andy Grove "won't talk about current goings on at Intel. He does, though, talk about its past and wistfully. He helped make Intel one of the world's greatest brands; for most men, that would be the prelude to a retirement full of self-satisfaction. Instead, there is much regret that Andy Grove's Intel wasn't able to use its brand name for even one other great thing besides microprocessors." The cult of Andy Grove consisted of a core set of values expressed as certain behaviors that Grove himself forced on employees long before the Intel values were formally published and put on employee badges. What many outsiders don t know is that management s actions within Intel's corporate culture were inconsistent with the published values. After Grove's departure, this gap between management behaviors and the published values was amplified, establishing the impetus for the decline of Intel's performance-based corporate culture. In light of Intel spending over $10 billion on 35 acquisitions, its diversification strategy lacked an overall execution plan for tying it all together and making it work within their existing business and economic models. Intel s lackluster stock market performance over the past six years has not prevented many investors from hoping that the stock will once again repeat its past stellar performance. The world has changed and the business model that made Intel the behemoth that it is today may have lost its relevance. More importantly, the culture that in the past fueled Intel s growth has now become ossified. In contrast to Andy Grove's reticence about the current Intel, the authors of Losing Faith share their objective observations on the post-Grove Intel, with its cultural anomalies that attempt to explain why the company has not been able to successfully diversify beyond its Grove-led dominance in microprocessors.

Genres: Nonfiction

210 pages, Hardcover

First published January 17, 2007

Reviews

[Kim Pallister · Rating 5 out of 5]

[note: reviewed this on my blog in 2008 - the following was written then]

The short version is that this book argues that Andy Grove was the rudder to the ship of Intel’s corporate culture (one of ruthless attention to detail, paranoia, and intellectual honesty) and that the ship has slowly drifted off course in the eras of leadership following his. I’ve recommended the book to several Intellites, as I feel there are some fairly spot-on -fairly painful- observations, and that they do a good job of dissecting and categorizing the symptoms and causes. On the other hand, my main complaints are that very few sources and data points are actually cited, and the authors pull the “we have a source but can’t disclose his name” card a few too many times. In fact, its only because I’ve spent eight of the past ten years there that I can recall my own case examples to support most of their theories. Book recommended to folks who work at Intel, or at companies dominated by a single visionary leader (I'm looking at you, Appleites!)