This arrangement—Noyce giving counsel and Moore and Grove managing—was formalized in the fall of 1974, when Noyce and Moore asked Grove to join them for lunch at an out-of-the way restaurant in Sunnyvale. “I don’t think I can spend so much time on Intel,” Noyce said to Grove. “How can we get you ready for more responsibility?” Forever unflappable, Grove paused only an instant before he answered, “You can give me the job.”60
In December, Intel announced that come April 1975, Grove would move into Moore’s position of executive vice president, Moore would take Noyce’s president/CEO slot, and Noyce would become board chair, replacing Arthur Rock, who would move to vice chairman. Noyce and Grove planned to meet for lunch nearly every Friday between October and April to ease the transition. Press coverage of the changes focused on Noyce and on Grove, who was less well known than the founders and could be easily slotted into the role of brilliant enfant terrible. As was so often the case, Moore did not get the attention he deserved.61
NOYCE HAD BEEN AN IDEAL FOUNDING PRESIDENT for Intel because he was, at his core, what Moore called “a wild expansionist.” The jobs Noyce enjoyed and excelled at—plotting a new product, brainstorming new ideas, establishing a market from thin air—meshed perfectly with Intel’s needs as a young company. He loved, he said, leading a company “walking the thin line next to the cliff of disaster,” his eyes always scanning for the next opportunity.62
Noyce led by knowing where he wanted to go and assuming someone else would figure out how to get there. When asked in 1983 if Intel had developed a long-range plan in its first few years of operation, he spoke of “our five year goal, one that we talked about a great deal, to do $50 million [in sales].” This, of course, was not a plan, not a step-by-step approach bristling with incremental target goals and detailed thinking. But in Noyce’s mind, achieving the goal was the plan.63
Explains Roger Borovoy, chief counsel at both Fairchild and Intel: “Noyce’s idea of planning was to yell, ‘Let’s take the hill!’” and then so inspire his troops with his own charisma and intelligence that they all began running behind him, no one exactly sure of his responsibilities, but everyone heading in the same general direction with the same general end in mind. Noyce and Moore spotted the semiconductor memory hill and led the company to the top of it. Next they spotted the microprocessor hill in the ideas Hoff had sketched, and then the digital watch hill, and flanks of the company rushed to secure those, too.64
Shortly before he decided to resign as president, Noyce tried to stake out one more hill for Intel: the personal computer business. In late 1974, a young Albuquerque, New Mexico, company called MITS announced it would soon begin selling a build-your-own-computer kit, which ran on an Intel 8080 microprocessor. These “Altair” machines were among the world’s first personal computers. Although they were quite rudimentary—anyone using them needed to know how to use a soldering iron—they offered the processing power of a $20,000 minicomputer at a cost of only $5,000. Less sophisticated Altair computer kits would sell for as little as $500.
Noyce must have learned about the Altair in early 1974, when Intel agreed to provide the processor. At this same time, Intel was building microprocessor development systems that made it easy for customers to debug the software they wrote for the microprocessor. These development systems in effect functioned as rudimentary computers. They could be programmed to simulate any number of environments, from controlling a lathe to running a cash register.
“Bob looked at the Altair, looked at the microprocessor development system, and [saw something very similar],” said Andy Grove. His imagination fired, Noyce sat down with Ed Gelbach, and, in Grove’s words, “they began marching along, heading into the personal computer business.” Gelbach developed a “great display” and hung mocked-up print advertisements for this “fully functional $300 computer” on his wall.65
The personal computer, however rudimentary, fascinated Noyce. He bought one for his son Bill, a computer buff who along with his high school friends had programmed a timeshare PDP-8 minicomputer to serve as a computer dating service. “You’ll never guess what this is, so I’ll tell you,” Bill Noyce wrote excitedly to his grandmother shortly after receiving his own machine. “Actually, it’s just a very quiet typewriter. When you type on the keyboard, letters appear on the screen.” Recalls Bill, “[My dad] didn’t think that a bunch of big computers in the middle of university classrooms or back rooms of banks would make much of a change in the world. But with computers in the hands of the people, changes were not anticipatable. He used to talk about how when electricity was used only to drive existing motors—the big motor in a mill, for example—it didn’t do much to change society. But when the fractional horsepower motor was put into people’s hands [in the form of sewing machines, electric fans, and power tools], there was a real change.”66
At a staff meeting in 1974, Noyce casually began a sentence with the phrase, “Now that we are in the computer business.” Gordon Moore looked surprised, and as he listened further, something almost unheard of occurred: Moore became positively furious. “I thought he was going to either faint or hit me,” recalls Gelbach. His lips thin and almost white from pressing them together, Moore finally managed to speak. “Ours is not—repeat after me—a general purpose microcomputer.” Where Noyce saw the possibility of Intel becoming a major computer manufacturer, Moore saw the far more likely possibility of Intel becoming a failed computer manufacturer. He needed to look no further than Microma (which ultimately cost Intel $15 million before it was sold in 1977) to appreciate the risks of attacking an entirely unknown consumer market.67
Noyce did not argue with Moore, although a few months later he did tell a Fortune interviewer, “only half in jest,” that Intel was “the world’s largest computer manufacturer.” Gelbach pulled the advertisements off the wall and repositioned the “computer on a board” as a design aid. Moore was probably right. Intel had enough to do without trying to take on the major computer manufacturers of the world.68
But the Altair episode may have given Noyce yet another indication that Intel had left its youth forever. “The entrepreneurial phase is not entirely over,” Noyce said when he announced his move to board chair, “but the emphasis is shifting to control.” At age six, Intel was the world’s leading manufacturer of semiconductor memories and the sixth largest semiconductor company in the world. It did not need to be capturing new hills. It needed to build on the hills already occupied. That meant manufacturing in massive quantities and making incremental improvements in existing technologies.69
What Intel needed going forward was not the courage to take great leaps ahead but the discipline to take orderly steps in a controlled fashion. Not leadership by “gut feel” or what Noyce called “personal contact” but management by hard, cold numbers. It needed not Noyce but Andy Grove, who in 1974 said he hoped to model Intel on McDonalds. The hamburger chain, Grove said, had taken standardization to a level that Intel would do well to copy. Intel needed to start thinking of itself as a maker of “high technology jelly beans” as uniform, standard, and predictable as the products served in clamshell boxes and paper wrappers emblazoned with the golden arches. Someone even mocked up a hamburger box emblazoned with “McIntel” for Grove. He kept it on his desk.70
Noyce knew that “control” was important work. But he did not want to do it. The press release announcing Noyce, Moore, and Grove’s new positions at Intel had included an assurance that even as board chair, “Noyce will continue to take an active role in the operating management of the company.” But Andy Grove has said that once the men were established in their new jobs, “Bob practically disappeared.”71
FOR ONCE IN HIS LIFE, Noyce needed a break. He had laid off one-third of his employees. His family had disintegrated. The value of his stock had plummeted. He had ended an affair with a woman for whom he had once cared deeply. He spent most of the early part of 1975 regrouping, traveling nearly constantly, usually for Intel and almost always extending his sta
y beyond the end of his business commitments. He spent two weeks in Europe, a week in Greece, another in Israel (where Intel had a small operation), and ten days in Japan. He skied in Aspen several times and in the Bugaboos (“the camp for aging athletes,” he called it) where a helicopter dropped him on the mountaintops to schluss his way down, a transponder clipped to his jacket in case he got lost in the snow.
One of the places Noyce visited in his world travels was quite unlikely: Crete, Nebraska, population 4,500. Shortly after the Noyces announced their decision to divorce, Bob decided to donate $50,000 to his father’s alma mater, Doane College in Crete. He and his brothers told their father to expect a big surprise at his sixtieth reunion, to be held in May 1975.72
When the appointed weekend arrived, Noyce, who was in Japan, arranged for his friend and flight instructor Jim Lafferty to fly the senior Noyces and Bob’s oldest brother Don from Oakland, California, where they were now living, to Crete in Bob’s new plane. Gaylord and Ralph would meet their parents in Nebraska. Bob would do his best to fly in from Tokyo in time to make the dinner banquet announcing that thanks to Bob’s generosity, a small campus chapel would now be designated the Noyce Chapel in Reverend Noyce’s honor.73
The weekend was the highlight of 81-year-old Ralph Noyce’s life. Jim Lafferty flew him and Harriet to Nebraska in their son’s jet. “It is as comfortable for us passengers as a commercial plane,” Harriet wrote, proudly adding that the airport attendant in Crete said it was the largest plane ever to land there. When Reverend Noyce learned of the chapel’s new name, when he listened to Gaylord speak on the topic “Small is Beautiful” at the dedication, when he saw his four grown sons sitting shoulder to shoulder in the pews, he was overcome. “I just don’t know how in the world to let you know how deeply it moves me,” he wrote to Bob. “I don’t know how a son could honor a father more.”74
Even with all the excitement of that weekend, for Harriet Noyce “Bob’s arrival [minutes before the banquet announcing the chapel dedication] was the high moment.” She explained, “The plane that Bob had boarded in Tokyo after a week’s business trip had arrived in San Francisco on time. He had caught the only plane to Omaha that could possibly give him time to fly his own plane back from Omaha to Crete. The tight schedule had worked out. It seemed nothing short of a miracle that the impossible had come true.” She added, “I find myself crying and blowing my nose here alone as I record the moment, choked up now as I never was during the whole momentous weekend itself.”
For Harriet, the Noyce chapel was more than a generous gift. It was a sign that her jet-setting, millionaire, soon-to-be-divorced son had not entirely forgotten his roots in the church and in the Midwest. It was an affirmation that even though he had strayed, he honored his father and his upbringing. The Noyce Chapel offered her hope that maybe, just maybe, the prodigal might return.
10
Renewal
At the end of her notes about the weekend at Doane College, Harriet Noyce wrote, “As we left the airport, son Bob was at one telephone booth making a date for Ann to meet him for dinner.” Ann was Ann Bowers, Intel’s head of personnel, and one of the only female executives in the semiconductor industry. She was 37 (ten years younger than Noyce) and physically small, with a quick mind and blunt manner of speaking that lent her a distinctly assertive air. She would become Noyce’s second wife.
Bowers had grown up in Oakmont, Pennsylvania, a small blue-collar town outside of Pittsburgh whose economy was anchored by a paint factory and a rolling mill. Her mother had been born in Oakmont, and her father, a patent attorney for aluminum production giant Alcoa, agreed to live there because it was located midway between Alcoa’s headquarters and its R&D labs. Bowers’s educated family and her own reserved demeanor left her feeling rather out of place for most of her childhood. She was a bookish girl, but the town’s one high school, which focused on vocational education, never required its students to write anything longer than a paragraph. She lived for the summers, when she spent weeks with family friends near Long Island Sound. There she learned how to sail and swim and play accompaniments on the piano while the family matriarch sang dramatic scales in a throaty contralto voice.
In 1955, Bowers left Oakmont for Cornell, from which she graduated four years later with a double major in English and Psychology. When it came time to choose a career, Bowers decided to apply for a position as a management trainee at Macy’s. She liked fashion, but more importantly, she had noticed that retail was one of the few businesses in which women wielded any real authority. At her job interview, she made it clear that she would only accept a job in California, where she had wanted to live ever since she took a quick visit to the West Coast as a high-school senior. She went to San Francisco in 1959 to work at the Macy’s store on Union Square. A few years later, she moved to the Peninsula to head personnel at the store opening in the new Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto.
The Macy’s jobs were followed by a two-year stint as a teacher at an economically depressed high school in San Jose—“I was tired of White Flower Days [monthly sales at Macy’s] and got caught up in the idea of civic good”—and three years as the head of personnel at a small laser and medical equipment startup company.1
In 1969, Bowers learned that Intel was preparing to hire its first personnel manager. “I didn’t really know a lot about Intel,” she says. “Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore meant nothing to me.” But several colleagues encouraged her to apply, as did a friend, who told her that she had once worked with Bob Noyce, “and he was wonderful.”
The first interview, with Intel finance chief John Cobb, went well enough to lead to a second. During this meeting, Bowers had the gall to tell Cobb, who was also slated to be her supervisor, that she wanted to report either to Gordon Moore or to Bob Noyce—“by that point, I had done some research, and [learned that] they were the ones to work for”—not to him. After a bit of negotiation, Intel agreed to change the reporting structure, and Bowers accepted the position. “My father,” she recalls, “almost lost it when he heard I was going changing jobs again. You just did not do this where I came from.” Within a few weeks on the job, Bowers learned, as would so many after her, that although she nominally reported to Noyce and Moore, she in fact reported to Grove.” This was fine with her. She found Grove to be a good boss.
In her first four years at Intel, the company grew from 200 to 2,500 employees. As head of personnel, Bowers not only recruited many of these workers but also ensured they received competitive benefit and salary packages, useful training, and meaningful performance reviews. She arranged seminars to teach new employees about stock options. Her office was often the first stop for people unhappy with their bosses or subordinates. She worked closely with Grove, who approached his management duties with characteristic rigor. He wanted to develop a highly disciplined, measurement-based corporate culture at Intel and read a management book every weekend for hints and ideas. He usually arrived on Mondays eager to put his newly acquired ideas into practice. The week following his study of Management by Intimidation was particularly memorable for Bowers.
Bowers also oversaw the small layoff at Intel in 1971 and the big one in 1974. She never managed to harden herself to this most difficult part of her job. During both layoff periods she developed canker sores so severe that it hurt to talk.
The strength of Bowers’s intelligence and the steel in her spine attracted Noyce almost immediately. Even while he was married to Betty Noyce and seeing Barbara Maness, he had several times asked Bowers to join him for drinks after business meetings. At one point, he arranged for his secretary to seat Bowers next to him at a corporate event. Bowers knew she was being pursued, but she refused to take the bait. “He was married, and he was my nominal boss,” she explains. “I wanted nothing to do with this.” Bowers also knew about Noyce’s affair with Maness. An employee had confidentially asked Bowers if she could do anything to end the relationship, which the employee feared would have negative repercussions for the company. Bow
ers had declined to intercede, but her knowledge of the affair made her even less susceptible to Noyce’s advances.
Which is not to say that she found Noyce unappealing. “I always found him phenomenally attractive. He had this aura. It was undefinable but very tangible. And it was very hard not to be affected by it—men were as well as women.” She continues, “I had never met anybody like that. I don’t know any movie stars, but maybe some of them have that same kind of aura. He had a way of looking right at you, like he’s looking right into you, like he really cared about you.”
The first time they spoke at any length, Noyce interrupted their conversation about Intel to ask Bowers, “How did you get to be the way you are?” When she looked startled, he added, “I have a daughter, and I’d like her to be like you.” Bowers was taken aback—“I remember thinking, ‘You don’t even know me; how can you ask me that?’”—but she was also flattered by his interest. Later she began to notice other things about Noyce. “He was a physical being, you could tell by the way he moved. When he was sitting down, with his swimmers’ shoulders, he seemed much bigger than he was. I always was surprised when he stood up. He should have been six feet tall.” But she kept her distance from him. “If we were in a group and people started to amble off,” she laughs, “I would be sure to amble off, too.”
In the fall of 1974, around the time Bob and Betty Noyce officially separated, Noyce invited Bowers to join a group of Intel employees heading to dinner at the Nut Tree, a popular restaurant about a half-hour’s drive north. Since this was a group activity, Bowers decided to join in. After dinner, however, she was irritated to learn that a mixup with the carpools meant that she would need to ride home with Noyce, alone. She climbed into his Cougar and immediately scooted as close to the passenger-side door as she could comfortably sit.
As they headed down the Peninsula towards Bowers’s house, Noyce started talking in the casual tone that everyone at Intel knew signaled an important statement. “I presume you know that I’m getting a divorce,” he said. Bowers had not known. She tried to appear nonplussed by the news, but a little voice inside her head said, “Well. That changes everything.”
The Man Behind the Microchip Page 35