11 THE MANAGEMENT WHO
FIRED THEMSELVES

One day in 1985, Andrew Grove invited his Chairman into his office and suggested they fire themselves.

Neither had been embezzling company funds; there was no sex scandal. It wasn’t even as if they had been doing a bad job, but their brand, Intel, was increasingly struggling to match the price/value offer of its Japanese competitors in its primary market of memory chips. It was getting harder and harder to make any profit while still remaining price competitive.

Grove felt that there was a need to take a completely fresh perspective on the company. He wanted to review all the everyday assumptions that tended to dictate the way Intel operated. The assumptions that had been in place for so long that they were accepted almost as if they were the rules of doing business.

He suggested to Gordon Moore, his Chairman, that they physically walk down and out of the building as if they had actually been fired. Once outside, they would turn around and re-enter the building; not as the current management team who were doing a “good enough” job, but as a hot-shot replacement management team who were going to turn the brand around.

Sitting down again after their short but mind-clearing walk, they looked at the existing plans and set themselves the objective of not just doing them all over again, but doing them better this time. They went through the plans and the assumptions behind them. Everything was up for review.

The result? They decided that one of their most fundamental assumptions was wrong. They were in the wrong business. Grove and Moore decided to shift the focus of the business and the brand away from memory chips to what, until then, had been a secondary priority. In the future, Intel would focus on microprocessors.

And the moral is that “good enough” is not enough. What are you planning to do that is ground-breaking, not just good enough?