‘Good to Great’ and what really happened at Intel…

So I’ve been reading a fair bit lately. Some lucky coincidences helped make a few more connections than would have otherwise been the case, and I thought I’d share.

Good to Great” by Jim Collins is a book you’ve probably heard of: it takes several pairs of businesses, in roughly the same position to begin with where over the course of time one becomes 10x the other. This looks a little bit like science, because you’re trying to remove as many confounding factors as you can. It makes a lot of sense to look for these differences if you are looking for patterns that work across sectors and people.

GtG does a great job of synthesising a huge amount of info and provides a list of lessons that make sense, individually and as a system of framework for running a company. I finished the book and felt like an evangelist for the ideas and principles they had found.

Also in my eBook backlog was ‘The Intel Trinity‘ by Michael Malone. It had been recommended by a tech blogger, and I wanted to deep-dive into some of the details behind the Intel / AMD comparison.

There is a huge divergence between the two. A lot of Intel’s success came from the unique people running it. Like, literally one of the early game-changers for Intel was having the Nobel prize-winner for the nascent field as the CEO — doors opened that would otherwise have been closed. How do you recreate that anywhere else?

In fact, the whole GtG comparison seems weird when you find out that AMD only really existed as a competitor because of the personal relationship between one Intel founder and the AMD CEO.

This is not to say that GtG isn’t a good book: it helped articulate a range of ideas and interactions which are important to running a company well in a competitive environment. If you want to be able to bring what you learn to your work environment, however, I think it’s much more useful to know the rest of the story and understand how the real leaders did their job at the time and within the constraints of their energy, knowledge and time available.

I have a pile of notes in both ebooks, but I feel like the real value of the exercise was the in-depth exploration of the whole thing. I would highly recommend reading them as companion volumes, so that you understand the extent to which GtG is a very condensed and edited summary of what really happens in creating a business.


 

 

While I’m at it, I would highly, highly recommend “High-Output Management” by Andy Grove. It’s a book that keeps coming up over and over again in tech management circles, and for good reason. He is extraordinarily clear about the value of management processes and disciplines, from each tiny piece to the way they fit together and work as a whole. It will make you a better manager and/or team member, and provides an excellent background to understanding the Intel that Grove created.

In the spirit of ‘Learn from the masters, not their students’ I would more highly recommend time with Grove’s book and anything by Drucker. Extending their insights to modern organizations is an exercise in understanding the fundamentals of their approaches.

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