Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Apple, yeah. Apple came later. In my call with Jensen, he was still very friendly with me, but he also reminded me in a very serious tone that we had the quality delivery manufacturing problem on the 40-nanometer. All right. I said I knew that, and it’s one of my priority problems. Give me a couple of weeks and I’ll get back with you. As I said, I did have several problems aside from the 40-nanometer manufacturing problem, and the problem with the argument that we were having with NVIDIA. Aside from that, we also had the problem of the pricing; was dropping faster than the cost. You don’t want to see that. Your gross margin percentage kept dropping. Because you had committed to a schedule of price drops with customers, but you weren’t able to drive down your manufacturing costs at the same rate. All right, so that was one problem. Another problem was the immediate one that trigger me to retake the CEO-ship, because the previous CEO had laid off, except he didn’t use the term layoff. He used bad performance review, the worst performance review, and there were about 600 or 700 of them, and he laid them off on the basis of their poor performance review. Well, we never did that. The worst we would do was to put them on probation for six months. Quite often at the end of the six months, everybody would go back to his or her old job. Some of them would get transferred because they were in the wrong jobs. So some of them would get transferred, but we almost never really fired people, even after the probation period.…

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