Dan Gillmor on Technology (fwd)

[Philip Johnson <johnson@hawaii.edu>]

An interesting article on leadership in Internet Time organizations,
based on an interview with one of the masters. 

---------- Forwarded Message ----------
Date: Monday, January 24, 2000, 9:33 AM -1000
From: MercDispatch <mercdispatch@SJMERCURY.COM>
To: MERC-GILLMOR-TEXT@DISPATCH.REALCITIES.COM
Subject: Dan Gillmor on Technology

_____________________________
M E R C U R Y   C E N T E R
http://www.mercurycenter.com/

S I L I C O N V A L L E Y . C O M
http://www.mercurycenter.com/svtech/

D A N   G I L L M O R   O N   T E C H N O L O G Y


By Dan Gillmor, Mercury News Technology Columnist
E-mail Dan at dgillmor@sjmercury.com
_____________________________


Andy Grove chairman, Intel Corp


Ask Andy Grove to name a great leader. ``Franklin
  Roosevelt,'' he says, and offers sound reasons for his
  choice.

  Equally compelling logic will inform tomorrow's historians
  when they're asked to name the great business leaders of
  this era -- and Grove will unquestionably be on that list.

  This is a pivotal time. In this election year, we'll
  select the political leaders who'll lead government toward
  a new century, amid massive change, even turmoil, in
  almost every kind of institution we know.

  Silicon Valley -- a metaphor as much as a place these days
  -- is at the epicenter of these shifts. In a period of
  such transformation, it seemed worthwhile to explore the
  nature of leadership, and to do so from a valley
  perspective. What is leadership? How does it differ in
  various settings, from political to business to moral?
  What is technology's impact on leadership? Does leadership
  change with the era, or are its principles fundamental,
  even immutable?

  In coming months I'll be asking these and other questions
  of Silicon Valley people who, by one measure or another,
  are leaders. I hope these conversations will help us
  understand some of the decisions that shaped their lives,
  and those of the people they've led.

  I also hope we'll veer into unexpected terrain, hence the
  word ``explore'' -- that we'll all learn new things as we
  head toward our destination.

  We're starting this series with Andy Grove, who by any
  measure is one of the great business leaders of the
  century. Employee No. 4 at Intel Corp., he was named
  president in 1979 and chief executive in 1987. He added
  the chairman's post in 1997 and turned over the CEO job to
  Craig Barrett in 1998. Under Grove's stewardship, Intel
  became the world's biggest maker of microprocessors, one
  of the leading enterprises of any sort.

  In a conversation at Intel's headquarters in Santa Clara,
  I ask Grove what made Roosevelt a great leader.

  ``He came into office at a time when the country was in a
  huge depression,'' suffering an unprecedented crisis of
  confidence, Grove says. ``He had to work on a lot of
  political issues at a time when he really didn't have a
  whole lot of power.

  ``He recast -- for better or worse -- the American social
  and economic system, and shepherded the country into a
  major war. He chartered the development of the most
  destructive weapon known to mankind.

  ``He had to get elected while he was doing things which
  were not universally approved by the population. He was a
  leader par excellence -- and a statesman par excellence.''

  In a subsequent e-mail message, responding to some
  follow-up questions, Grove amplifies on Roosevelt's
  greatness: ``He took steps ahead of where common and
  popular thinking was at the time (at least as I read
  history). Then he stayed the course, risking criticism,
  while taking pains to explain his thinking (fireside
  chats).''

Different leadership:Political, private roles have some
  common rules

  Political leadership and private leadership differ in key
  ways, notably in how power is acquired. But some
  definitions apply to both.

  ``Practically, power means to be able to influence the
  course of events, in both public and private spheres,''
  Grove says. ``It is to be accepted as a leader, and that
  means again you've got to have people following you.''

  Leadership, meanwhile, ``is the skill set or the set of
  conduct and behavior that you engage in, in order to
  induce other people to follow you. The combination of your
  position with that set of conduct gives you power.''

  Power and leadership are closely related, he says, noting
  an important distinction.

  ``A lot of times people think of power as something that
  you can give to somebody. I look at it this differently.
  In a knowledge organization, you can take power away, but
  you cannot give power to somebody. I can be kicked out and
  whatever power I had inside Intel is gone from one day to
  the next, but nobody can give me the power to influence
  thousands of people's actions. I have to exercise
  leadership.''

  A board of directors maintained Grove in office while he
  was Intel's CEO. Yes, he notes, he also had to persuade
  the people working for him to follow his leadership, and
  the results if they did not -- such as undeveloped or
  unmarketed products -- might have serious negative
  consequences for the company.

  ``We lead people who didn't elect us,'' he notes, an
  obvious but important distinction between elected and
  appointive offices. ``A leader in a private organization
  still needs to have the goodwill and the intellectual
  investment of the employees that he or she leads.'' The
  politician needs, most of all, the vote.

  Leaders make decisions. For Grove and his colleagues at
  Intel, none was tougher than Intel's move in the 1980s
  away from making semiconductor memory to the
  microprocessors that power computers and other intelligent
  devices. In retrospect it was brilliant. At the time, as
  has been well-chronicled, it was wrenching.

  ``The difficulty of divorcing yourself from your own past
  and experience is what makes it difficult for you to deal
  with the facts,'' he says. ``The actual implementation of
  the change was not all that hard. It was just coping with
  the facts and judgments of the picture, of the decision
  necessary. That that was the hard part.''

  Wider field of view: Communications push marks a huge
  shift

  Less celebrated, probably because the changes aren't yet
  so apparent, is Intel's more recent decision to widen its
  field of view: a major push into communications, an area
  that has become far more important to Intel and others as
  networks, especially the Internet, have mushroomed.

  ``What we are doing is building a new business on top of
  an existing business, as compared to demolishing or
  picking up the pieces out of a demolished old business and
  building a new business in its place,'' he says. `` It's
  harder in some ways, but getting out of a business is the
  hardest thing there is. It may be more work, but it's not
  more pain. There's no comparison.''

  How, I ask, did Intel's leadership deal with employees who
  didn't want to make this transition? What did it take to
  persuade them?

  ``Logic with some,'' he says, ``spelling out how
  undesirable the alternatives were; talking about it
  personally quite a bit; reassigning some in management who
  wouldn't or couldn't change.''

  Technology's impact on business, and the way business
  leaders do their jobs, has already been profound. Will
  that also happen in the political process? In a sense,
  Grove argues, politics is ahead of business in this
  regard, at least in the getting-elected part of politics.
  Information technology long ago created massive change.

  ``The impact of television, if you wish, on the political
  scene probably goes back -- at least in my conscious years
  -- to the Kennedy-Nixon debates on TV in 1960,'' he says.
  The most significant impact of technology on business, on
  the other hand, ``is only about 10 years old, or maybe
  less than 10 years old.

  ``In its simplest form, it's electronic communications,
  electronic feedback -- the ways of reaching anybody up or
  down the chain electronically through e-mail,'' he says.
  ``And it has changed management styles and changed
  leadership styles. It gives you feedback, very rapid
  feedback. But it also gives you access -- provided you are
  willing to avail yourself of it, and not everybody does.''

  Many politicians can't use e-mail in the same way, because
  the constituency can be so much larger. ``Public people
  who have used electronic media in the one-to-a-million
  structure can't suddenly turn around and be one-to-one
  with all of those millions of people, because physically
  they are incapable of doing it,'' Grove notes. ``So they
  build in protection, either electronic protection or human
  protection.'' The result is sporadic, even unreliable,
  contact with constituents.

  Some politicians have set up e-mail pseudonyms. One is an
  unnamed U.S. senator with whom Grove has corresponded,
  ``just like the rapidity and turnaround time that I would
  have inside Intel, but it is not his official e-mail
  address.'' Grove had a more typical constituent's
  experience with this politician when a message got shunted
  to the ``official'' e-mail address. The response was a
  plainly canned, automatic reply written by a staffer.

  Another role: How Grove would react if he were a
  constituent

  How did Grove like that? How would he react if he were a
  constituent, a follower?

  ``I wouldn't do it again,'' he says. ``That kind of
  experience will drive you back to sending a postcard or
  writing a letter.'' (It's no coincidence that Congress
  pays much more attention to letters written on paper than
  e-mail.)

  A prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist told me
  recently that values lie at the core of leadership. I
  asked Grove if he thought that was true.

  ``I think building a common value system between leader
  and follower communities is necessary for policies and
  actions to be accepted,'' he says. ``It's not an end in
  itself.

  ``Let's suppose you and I know each other and we have
  developed a certain amount of trust, and when I tell you
  to do something that you don't want to do, the fact that
  you know me and you've relied on my advice or instructions
  in the past, and it has worked, is a value. But that value
  greases the skids for a piece of advice -- piece of
  instruction -- to be accepted by you.''

  In this sense, then, values become a foundation.

  ``The values are the underpinning for directional
  leadership to be possible -- the underpinning for a leader
  to be able to lead. . . We can all be
  terribly customer-oriented and we all be terribly
  high-integrity and all that stuff, but somebody at the end
  of the day has to build a product and ship a product and
  satisfy a customer and do the work that's underpinning
  that.''

  The foundation built by one leader can feel solid, but it
  can also be somewhat ephemeral.

  ``This is one of the difficulties that you have when
  there's a major change in leadership, and particularly
  when outsiders come into one company where they don't have
  that foundation built,'' Grove says. ``They may bring a
  brand-new vision and a brand-new set of business policies
  and business directions, but it kind of floats in thin
  air, at least for a while.''

  One of technology's most dramatic impacts on business has
  been the phenomenon called ``Internet Time,'' an
  expression sometimes credited to Grove. It refers to the
  relentless compression of regular time, largely due to
  competitive pressures, in an era where change is
  accelerating and the rewards of speed -- first to market,
  for instance -- are not just vast but almost immeasurable.

  ``Even when the process is not electronic, that speed-up
  process is felt and puts pressure on everything,'' he
  says. ``For business deals, decisions, approvals -- all of
  that stuff -- you speed it up by this increased
  expectation.''

  Does that give leaders (and followers) less time to
  reflect on the consequences of their decisions?

  ``The method of thinking about stuff is different,'' he
  says, noting that different people have different ways of
  handling the decision-making process.

  Some prefer to ``think and discuss their way to an
  answer.'' Others would rather ``read a memo and think
  about it and render a judgment or a decision or a
  conclusion some period of time later.''

  The new world of communications, in which information and
  debate quickly flow in multiple directions, ``favors that
  first kind of decision-making,'' Grove says. That happens
  to be his own style, he notes.

  ``Now, that's not that you don't reflect,'' he says. ``You
  just reflect in chunks.''

  Other leadership: `Generational change' is under way in
  industry

  I ask him to name other Silicon Valley technology leaders
  he admires. He declines, but notes ``a generational
  change'' under way in the industry.

  For about a decade, Grove has served on the Computer
  Systems Policy Project, a small group of CEOs that meets
  twice annually in Washington to discuss policy issues
  related to technology. He's struck by how many new faces
  have popped up there in recent years.

  ``It's going to take a while for the new generation to
  build up the values, the foundation for it, the
  believability, the track record and the reputation,'' he
  says. A few years from now we'll look back and see the
  shift more clearly: ``There may be more leadership than
  you realize.''





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