We do not have the culture of accountability. Decisions are made by teams, when something goes wrong, nobody can be held accountable. The focal system allows these failure to be hidden, and people who participated in the erroneous decisions are often rewarded if they play the game right. In essence, people are rewarded for playing by Intel's rule, not rewarded for winning.
This is fine in the old days when we were chasing megaherts, but time has changed.
There are many meetings where the leaders only can hear about schedules that are on time and our fixes for products that are implemented. Anyone who wants to have a discussion about a problems that are broken and needs a decisions on an adjustment or help needed is removed and replaced with a Yes man. Thus all the projects fail, others are very late and others are totally worse than failures all because managers and senior managers simply refuse to listen and do what they need to, make hard decisions and help with their judgement as many have no real skills anymore!
@kvl: Enjoyed your post and fully agree!
The king and his minions have no clothes, should we tell them, LOL.
Many American companies fail because American simply like to hear sweet things rather than facts.
And Indian is a master of sweet talks. They put the fate of their companies in the hand of Indians and this is what happens.
You need hardworking people, like the Israelis, Chinese and the "original" American. You want BS, then you eat curry.
"decisions are made by teams and nobody can be held accountable". If we kept the team size limited, it would lead to greater individual accountability, because the work must be spread over a limited number of people. But Intel never does that. They throw dozens of people on a silly little project that's a 12 man job. It ridiculous, really. The 360 was supposed to help with this problem (review your peer). The problem is also in our leadership. Leaders who struggle with other’s accountability view their job as mandating compliance. But leaders who get accountability right know that most people want to do great work. These leaders view their job as creating an environment where commitment and self-discipline are volunteered. There are very few managers/leaders at Intel who create environments where we fell compelled to fully self-commit. The mandate culture is way too pervasive at Intel.
"informed risk taking"
We are only informed after they risked and lose $10 billion.
We want to be informed about the identity of the responsible person(s)
What's even more absurd is that we rank business opportunities (and performance) based on these fanciful made up numbers and "market models." No wonder real world opportunities - like mobile - didn't look attractive!?!
I really think that those who have only ever lived inside the Intel bubble don't know any better. And many of the others know better than to question the status quo, no matter how nonsensical.
Just a broken, broken culture. I joined Intel well past the Grover era, so my only impression of Intel culture is the inwardly looking, self-deceiving bureaucratic goat rodeo that we have today.
12,000 good people lose their jobs because management screwed up. I can't believe the shareholders are not aware.
There is fail even in the ACT cuts. There is a tunnel visioned single minded focus on cutting heads only; there is no NO regard for ability to run the business, or even comprehension about what the cuts are doing to the ability to complete the tasks required to execute ACT itself! Closing 80 sites? Firing 12,000 people? Stopping major projects? These things require massive planning and work but the folks who could perform this work down in the ranks are quickly disappearing. Idiots.
Each quarter we present to management called Quarterly Business Reviews on the goals and our accomplishments to those goals. Most of the time, those numbers presented are made up. While management is aware, they choose to not challenge the validity of those numbers. Hence these agencies working for Intel, are also keenly aware how to survive within the Intel culture. They make up numbers to preserve their yearly business with Intel. I have discussed this with my management, they I get blank stares! "The emperor with no close on" syndrome. Poor Intel!
Couldn't agree more.
The foundation for effective teams is trust. Even before the mass layoffs, I learned not to trust most anyone in my group.
As someone who came to Intel from outside, so many decisions just made no sense outside of the frame of parroting misguided BS from above in order to sustain funding and political support from internal customers.
The arrogance and ignorance is palpable. Lack of accountability to real, outside customers (or objective performance metrics) resulted in people who led massive failures being promoted and put into leadership roles...nothing learned from these failures (mistakes...what mistakes?)...and reprisal on those who try to push things in different directions.
Misplaced incentives and dysfunction have been in place for so long that many - especially those who have only ever worked at Intel - don't know better. All they know is playing the game. And those best at the game are running the asylum.
The favoured ones don't do mistakes. They are doing "informed risk taking".
The many are paying the mistakes and bad decisions of the few.
Managers in INTEL are the most precious asset. They know so much. Here is why. ;-)
"Hello GM, I'm a manager in your division, and I need to manage Linux team. My background is chemistry college. No clue what is Linux. Do this thing is kind of peanut butter? What I should do?"
"Please, take a whole day course: Linux for dummies, made by INTEL. After 8 hours of training with our INTEL super duper in-house instructors, you be domain expert. Please, add in your FOCAL report for this year: I acquired Linux domain expertize. Then you be eligible for EE. Thank you".
:-))
BLAME FIXING culture of Intel is the reason why the company is where it is.
It's the long term consequence of ranking and rating. People develop structures to diffuse accountability.
"In the old days" it was an Intel value to admit mistakes. It was role modeled by senior people.
Then the growth stopped and periodic layoffs occurred. R&R turned into counting how many mistakes an employee made. This is stupid and lazy by the managers -- but most of them were by then new to the job, and Intel eliminated new manager training.
If employees fail, they get fired. If executives fail, they get bonuses and call it "learnings". It's become so obvious that executives don't even try to hide their charade anymore.
I was wrongfully punished for being honest and taking the blame on myself even though there were several other people who were also equally responsible. Unfortunately I was just 2 months in my job when it happened. I learnt a lesson of not trusting anyone and learn to defend even if I did wrong.