Q:  Many people have written asking questions about the authors. Below is the standard response.  

A: The author’s names are pseudonyms for the real names of the two people who worked at Intel.   Their locations will not be revealed nor discussed, other than that they both worked at key Intel sites during their careers with the company.  They want you to know that they worked at Intel over the last 15 years and had solid reputations.  The authors want the book to stand on its own and not be dependent on WHO wrote it but on the accuracy of the content and the style of the prose.

Q: I am about half way through the book as of writing this. I have just “been retired” after 26 years at Intel. I have found myself alternating between a whole hearted agreement and a feeling that you are bitter and twisted and missed all the good bits of a company full of great people. Obviously as a 26 year veteran, I fit into the Grove Survivor age group, though I was in Europe until 1994 and may have missed some of it. I certainly was senior enough in 1990 to have been a beneficiary of the 1990s boom. Some of your comments do cause me to wince as they hit the mark. At the same time I don’t think there was a moment at Intel where I did not think about performing well to Intel Values. I don’t think I am alone. Still and all, I am enjoying the book and I have recommended to a reading group I attend at Portland State University where we have been studying emergent behaviors in complex environments in a fun way.

I do have a couple of questions. Firstly, I spent the last few years at Intel running their Ethics program, known as BPX (Business Practice Excellence) which was hinged heavily around the Discipline value and specifically: “Conduct Business with uncompromising Integrity and Professionalism.” During the course of teaching BPX, I constantly drew links between Integrity and all 6 values. Did you see no sign of uncompromising integrity in your survey of values? For me it is the key. Secondly, when teaching values either in a class or an informal venue, I always emphasized that all 6 values needed to operate in tandem, The imagery I used was a trampoline with 6 springs stating that to jump in the sweet spot you had always to seek balance between the values, i.e. it was OK to be out of balance momentarily but you needed to recognize that you were out of balance and strive to get back to the sweet spot. I always felt that good Intel managers did strive to do this. To me there always seemed to be a lot of good Intel managers. What was your experience? 

A:   We appreciate your honest feedback and your excellent questions.  There is a lot of information in your email and we will try and respond to every question.  Given that you didn’t come to the US until 1994, that would more than likely exclude you from what we termed Grove Survivor, but rather your 26 years more than likely has you in the entitled class given your years of service and more than likely a high grade level.  Nevertheless, we wanted to let you know that we are not bitter or twisted, but rather disappointed at what has happened to a company (and a lot of the people) that we grew to love over our tenure.  We believe the culture changed and many of the people changed with it over time.  Our observations over 15 years would be hard to argue as we observed and lived the changes in the culture and the people.  

We especially liked your trampoline analogy and would like to take a slightly different view on it to answer your questions.  If you look at the springs as being the different values, we believe that the canvas represents accountability.  Without the canvas (accountability) the springs (values) are worthless.  When there is no accountability among entitled personnel for failure from repeated mistakes – especially as we observed in the Barrett era – then the consequences for aligning with failure, if you're a fellow entitled manager, become less severe than the consequences of aligning with an alternative proposal, even if that alternative proposal is better aligned with the values (it "pays attention to detail", "challenges the status quo", and incorporates "learnings from...failures").  We could cite many examples of managers who started out as good managers, only to fall victim to the changes in the culture as expressed in their observed behaviors.  

Sadly, we could not find one case where a manager would live the values as described above when it meant crossing another entitled manager.  Where all these managers bad people?  Absolutely not!   We believe that they, like you, sincerely endeavored to live the values and successfully did so under most circumstances.  However, when push came to shove and the personal stakes were high, these good, but entitled people would invariably align themselves with the path of fewest negative consequences –the path of fellow entitled personnel – even if that path violated values and was not the best thing for the company, but was the best thing for them.  People would gain more by not crossing other entitled managers, even as they were violating values, than by taking the road less traveled (Risk Taking) when that road was the harder road to travel, but the right decision for the company overall.  As we mention in later chapters, the culture evolved to foster personal gain over what was best for the company – all at the expense for lack of accountability to the Intel values.  The focal process only served to reinforce these behaviors (a popularity contest of can the person get along with everyone – groupthink, rather than did they live the values and get the right results that benefited the company).   

So to answer your question, if you define uncompromising integrity by living the values regardless of the personal or political consequences, we could not find a single case, in any scenario where an entitled manager demonstrated uncompromising integrity.  There are many examples of managers who did exhibit it early on in our careers, only for these same managers to later succumb to the effects of the culture and alter their behaviors.  This transition, we believe, happened in the Barrett (no accountability) era.  We refer to it in the book as “rubber band” discipline.   

As a side note, we are not advocating that Intel have a blood-thirsty environment where people quickly bring out the ax, but in our humble opinion, the extreme lack of accountability is too far at the other end of the spectrum and has created an unhealthy environment where good people compromise their integrity to fit in with the changed culture.

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