Geoff Colvin of Fortune have said it takes 4 bad or wrong CEOs to wreck a company. From Otellini who brushed off mobile revolution, to BK who squandered process technology leadership, to Swan who missed the AI revolution, guess who is the 4th wrong CEO?
Steve Jobs was the fourth CEO of Apple but he superbly evaded the 4 CEO rule.
Time is running out for Pat to pull a Steve Jobs trick…
10 replies (most recent on top)
Everyone past Grove. Barrett really su-ked. $100 billion in stock buybacks, money wasted. All the bad acquisitions.
The one big advantage of Grove is that he was ruthless and quick to take action. Most of todays employees would quit if Intel was run like it was under Grove. Groves weakness was he did not trust if he did not know you and put a lot of his incompetent cronies in charge of critical things. Anyone remember Les Valdez?
Otellini was the worst - Sold XScale, missed phones & tablets, Xbox.
Worst part is that he filled product groups with marketing people and started the rot.
I didn’t think Paul Otellini was that bad… Barret and the rest since Paul though…. Yeah.
Ok, well said guys…now i have meaningful thoughts to cut n paste into my paywall.
$7B on Mcafee, really a bad strategic and financial move. That money could have been allocated to various other teams or projects, even a new fab.
Craig Barrett before Paul also didn't do good job. He wasted $25B for acquisition and none were successful. Under him for three years there were 0-1% raise for employees which was demoralizing. I think 4 bad CEO rule already passed with Bob and Pat is 5th worst CEO among all.
This is an old topic that keeps resurfacing. In reality an argument can me made that PG is the 5th bad CEO. Dr CB wasted billions on Itanium as the future of 64 bit when in reality it turned out to be x64 which AMD took to market first. Itanium was always a low volume product kept alive to serve a small market and save face for CB. He was also the CEO with the sales practices that got the first ever $1 billion fine assessed by the EU on a company. So Intel is blazing new trails in the area of bad CEOs. The bad CEOs would be CB, PO, BK, BS, and PG. It is a wonder Intel is doing as well as it is with the "leadership" it has had for over a quarter century.
Five CEOs in a row: Craig Barrett before Paul Otellini pushed an enormous distraction onto Intel by pursuing the Itanium approach
The CEO who missed out on AI
Pat is NO Steve Jobs.