Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…That was quick second, we move on to playbook? Yeah. There's one thing that we didn't discuss from the history, I think it really belongs here in the playbook. For new listeners that are listening as part of Potapalooza or otherwise, this is the time when we talk about themes that we pull out from the story. That is the playbook that Intel ran that we can try and run in our businesses, that we might look out for in history rhyming. The one in this story that really jumped out to me is the power of middle management. I think we didn't totally touch on when Andy is going around and he's talking to his middle-level executives and he's saying we're going to get out of the memories business. The head of sales is adamant and pissed. He's thrown a tantrum. His number next to his name and everybody under him is about selling memory, and then he goes to the factory and that their whole livelihood is based on this. The head of the factory said, there's no way to think about it. There's no way we can retool this whole thing. Meanwhile, the people who are actually really close to the customer, the people that are really close to the product, not the executives, but the mid-level management who is actually working with the day-to-day individual contributors and working with customers, they see the writing on the wall. By the time the changes trickled down to them, the middle management's like, “Oh, yeah. No, no, no. We definitely need to be doing way more in CPUs, and we have a plan for that, because while there's all this politicking and infighting at the top, we had a plan. No, it wasn't coordinated, it wasn't cohesive, but everybody had assembled the resources that they needed to, to make this happen and operationalize whatever came down when it came down. Andy writes a bunch about this in the book that he was shocked by it. This group of people, as you said, that are not high enough within the company, that they're removed from customers and caught up in all this political infighting but they're actually close to the actual operations and customers. they were already doing this. They had already just organically started reallocating resources away from memories and into CPUs.…

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