Intel is the latest Fortune 500 giant to test the ‘4 wrong CEOs’ rule
How a string of ill-suited leaders can doom companies to the five stages of decline.
Maybe Intel just needs a Taiwanese CEO? ; )
Honestly the article is bullshit. It's right, but for all the wrong reasons. Intel isn't failing because it failed to buy OpenAI or partner with Apple. Intel is failing because they've made shit design decisions on their chips, sat on their laurels when they were riding high and just raised prices (giving up the engineering lead to AMD and TSMC), and then utterly fumbled the responses to multiple public failures when things started to go down hill.
Half the article is about how it takes 4 bad CEOs to wreck a company and Intel is far down that path.
CEOs have very little to do with the failure or success of most large companies. If they work very hard they can pull a company out of a death spiral, or start it down one, but failure or success takes years if not decades of steady improvement or decline. All the examples of "failures" given in the article are terrible and don't demonstrate at all that those CEOs were bad.
One of the worst problems with businesses in the US currently is this culture of fetishizing CEOs. They're paid far too much for what they actually bring to companies, and people grossly exaggerate how much of an impact CEOs have on companies. If you want proof of his just take a look at literally any company Elon Musk is a CEO of. The fact that none of those companies (particularly Twitter) have filed for bankruptcy yet shows exactly how little a truly terrible CEO actually impacts things.
generative AI, which OpenAI released to the world in 2022
What‽ We've only been dealing with this shit for 2 years‽ Fuck it feels like 5 LMAO
With 30% ownership it could have been at the forefront of generative AI, which OpenAI released to the world in 2022.
Do they think openai invented the concept of generative ai, because that's what their statement implies?
hopefully the bubble bursts soon enough so we'll never have to learn how does it feel to deal with it for five years.
Put the newest intern in charge for a year. They couldn't do much worse than the last 4 CEOs, and would be much cheaper.
And when the company fails anyway because it's too late to change course, the intern is an easy scapegoat!
I already felt this way about intel when they hired fucking Will.I.Am to be spokesperson. He made more money in a month than most of their engineers in a year. That was a decade ago. It's only been downhill since. I hope they go fully bankrupt at this point and someone worthy can take over the patents.
Anyone who buys into Will.I.Am's hype is automatically the wrong person to run anything more than a lemonade stand
If Intel said yes to Apple, it would have just made Apple a failure. They've done a shit job at mobile chips for years, and never would have given Apple the control that has led to Apple being at the forefront of the mobile market. (And don't have the advanced nodes Apple is taking the lions share of either).
Four bad CEOs is like a grade school level of analysis. You can spend half an hour on Wikipedia and come up with like 18 other patterns that connect the companies.
Do you really think Warren Buffett (or any other serious investor or business analyst), is sitting there counting out the number of bad CEOs on their fingers when making an investment decision?
What's happening with all the money Biden has given Intel? That just disappeared?
It had probably been paid to people who deserve it less than me. I never steered Intel in a bad direction after all.
The money was to build fabs, which they are still doing - which is costing them most of their money they struggle to afford because their current chips are awful.
Their fabs may be shit too. Hopefully the new ones are better
Part of it was to create new jobs and hire people, meanwhile they - checks notes - fired a bunch of people?
I just know I don't like Pat Gelsinger's over confident bragging style, it seems dishonest. His claim of winning back Apple was ridiculous, Intel was so far behind what Apple was doing with the M1 it wasn't even funny. And they are even further behind now, than they were then!
Whether he succeeds remains to be seen, but it's not looking good.
Maybe you're right about Gelsinger. I've seen him spew BS but figured he does it because he has to, that Intel has been fundamentally broken for decades, and that he was as a good a CEO choice as they could have made.
he was as a good a CEO choice as they could have made.
I'm not so sure, with the scandals of crashing Intel CPU's we have now, both their CPU line and their production is getting extremely poor PR.
I suspect Gelsinger pushed unfinished products, because he is desperate for results, and now Intel seems worse off than when he took over reputation wise. Gelsinger is losing both money and PR value on 2 fronts for Intel now.
Intel used to have a pretty stellar reputation for reliability, especially in the server market. It seems to me they have little left to build on now.
Something something history repeats itself as farce or something
For context: Intel was founded by people who thought Fairchild Semiconductors wasn't receiving the necessary funding or respect from the owning company.