Inside Intel. Tim Jackson
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and safety glasses. They could be ordered to pick up wafers with a vacuum wand instead of with tweezers, to make sure that no physical contact took place which could break off microscopic chunks of material that would contaminate the processes further down the line.
But professional engineers were less unthinking than hourly paid line workers in their acceptance of orders from above. They would do what they were told if they could see a good reason for it, but not otherwise. As John Reed’s reaction to a hostile performance review had shown, criticism that was too harsh could easily be counter-productive. So in 1971 Grove was caught between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, he was answerable to Noyce and Moore as operations manager for getting prototypes into production at reasonable quality, cost and speed; on the other, there was a limit to how hard he could drive the engineers beneath him to meet his goals.
When the pressure built up, it was in meetings between manufacturing and marketing that the safety-valve would blow. Bob Graham, who had had time to go fishing so often in his first year at Intel, was now banging the table regularly, complaining that his customers in the computer business weren’t getting the parts they had been promised, and demanding to know why Grove had not met this production forecast or that yield projection. More frustratingly still, he would also complain when Grove delivered parts that he had not asked for. Graham had adopted the sales slogan of ‘Intel Delivers’ for use outside the company. He was damned if he was going to let Grove get away with failing to deliver to him.
On one occasion Graham was put in a particularly embarrassing position. Intel’s Japanese distributor had a number of customers waiting for matching sets of memory chips and the drivers that were needed to make them work. What Grove actually shipped to Japan was a number of incomplete sets. When an incomplete consignment arrived at Yokohama, the distributor sent Graham an angry telex: ‘HAVE RECEIVED MUSKETS STOP AWAIT BULLETS AND POWDER STOP’.
After a series of furious confrontations, in which Graham taxed Grove with sending parts that he couldn’t sell and failing to send parts that he had promised to sell, a compromise was brokered by Moore. In the company’s internal financials, Grove’s organization would receive credit only for boxed stock that was delivered in accordance with the production forecast. Any parts Grove produced that Graham had not been forewarned about would come ‘free’.
What made the disputes particularly bitter was that Graham and Grove were of exactly equal status. They were founder-employees, though not founder stockholders. Both of them had been given stock options along with every other Intel hire, but Noyce and Moore never even offered to sell them a chunk of shares at the outset. The pair also received promotion at the same time: when they were at a conference together in Tokyo, a congratulatory telex arrived from Noyce informing them that their job titles had been raised to vice-president.
From where Graham sat, it was clear that Grove knew how to take orders from Bob Noyce and how to ask advice from Gordon Moore; and he knew how to keep the people who reported to him in line. But Grove seemed unable to work cooperatively with a manager who was one of his peers. Graham resented what he saw as Grove’s constant attempts to expand his own empire by ordering Graham’s sales and marketing people around – and sometimes by trying to force Graham himself to take his advice.
‘I’m not that kind of person,’ Graham recalled afterwards. ‘You can’t tell me what to do. You can tell me what you’d like me to do. You can tell me what you’re going to do. But you can’t tell me what to do unless I agree to it … [Yet] Andy’s tendency was to tell you what the ads ought to be like and what ought to be in them, when they ought to run, how much they ought to cost and who the reps ought to be. He was delving into areas where he had no expertise.’
To make matters worse, Grove had a strong tongue. For Noyce and Moore, both brought up in God-fearing households where cursing was very much frowned upon, it was little more than a tease when Grove got up from the meeting table and announced his intention to ‘go for a piss’. But Graham’s resentment burned red-hot when Grove told him day after day that he was a ‘stupid sonofabitch’ or a ‘bastard’ or a ‘dumb shit’.
Grove also knew how to make the best of a disability. In his early years at Intel, the hearing problem he suffered from required him to wear an ungainly hearing-aid that wrapped around his ears and over his crown like a pair of headphones. Just at the point when he was being told something he did not want to hear, the device would seem to fail – and Grove would interrupt loudly, bellowing ‘Huh? Huh?’ He was also able to use the device as a weapon of battle. When a speaker at a meeting was running over his allotted time or straying from the point, Grove would take the hearing-aid off his head and, with an eloquent gesture that said more than any complaint or expression of boredom, thump it down on the table to indicate that he would listen no further.
The last straw for Graham was a dispute over something apparently trivial: the data sheets on its products that Intel sent to engineers, providing technical specifications and performance information. When the 1103 chip was ready to ship, Graham discovered that the bipolar driver circuits that went with the 1103 wouldn’t work with the chip over the full temperature range that the memory chip itself could tolerate. He immediately took up the problem with Grove.
‘I could not get Andy to understand that the operating range over which the memory would work, the drivers needed to work too.’
Soon it became clear that modifying the drivers to make them more tolerant of extremes of temperature would be technically unmanageable: it would raise the cost and make the devices clunkier. Graham then decided to aim for the next best thing. He told Grove that if the drivers and the memory chip would not work together across the memory chip’s full temperature range, then the data sheets would simply have to be frank about the narrower temperature range in which they worked.
Grove disagreed. Few customers would care about the issue, he said, since their computers were already adequately air-conditioned and they would be unlikely to test the performance of the Intel parts below freezing or close to boiling point. Even if they did, the problems with temperature range would never be visible to the outside world. Tested on their own, the drivers worked across the full range; it was only when running together with the 1103 that their range narrowed.
Graham insisted that the honest thing to do was to make the problem clear on the data sheets. He wanted to eliminate even the tiniest risk that Intel might have to compensate a customer who discovered that its engineers had been misinformed. But Grove would not be moved.
Day by day the dispute escalated, until finally it reached the point where the two men were no longer on speaking terms. Noyce was called in to adjudicate. Late one morning he ordered Graham to publish the data sheets as Grove had specified.
‘Bob, we can’t do this,’ Graham replied.
‘Do it anyway,’ snarled the Intel founder.
Thirty minutes later Graham was sitting at a restaurant table facing his wife, Nan. He had got into the habit of calling her and inviting her out to lunch when the internal battles got too much for him, so she knew that this morning there must have been a bad one.
Graham looked into his drink. ‘Nan,’ he said, ‘I’m not working at Intel any more.’
His wife’s eyes filled with tears as she recalled the pressure they had been under during recent months, and realized that it would now all be behind them. ‘Thank God!’ she said.
On his way from the confrontation with Noyce to his lunch date with his wife, Graham had cleared his desk. He wasn’t fired; he had simply been presented with an ultimatum: either leave or publish the data sheet the way Grove wanted. At that moment he’d recalled that it was precisely in order to get away from issues of politics and style that he had left Fairchild. If Intel, for all its fine words, was going to revert to the characteristics of his old employer that had so dismayed him, then he wanted no further part in the venture.
For Noyce and Moore, the decision was tough but straightforward. It had increasingly become clear that Intel was too small a company for both Graham and Grove. They would therefore have to choose which one to lose. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the specific dispute that had precipitated the decision, Grove