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7

Yellow Snow

IT WAS BECOMING CLEAR that Intel wasn’t a startup any more. The company’s sales had grown from a token $566,000 in 1969 – largely earned from the bipolar circuit built for Honeywell – to a more serious $4.2m. Although a sharp downturn hit the electronics market in late 1970, forcing the company to lay off some of its workers, the introduction of the 1103 in October made it inevitable that the company would expand. Its workforce, which had passed the 100 mark at the beginning of the year, was approaching the point where Noyce, Moore and Grove could no longer expect to know every employee by name.

Intel was also on the move. Anticipating that it would be impossible to meet demand for the 1103 from the old Union Carbide plant in Mountain View, the company had bought twenty-six acres of orchards further south in Santa Clara, where property prices were lower. By spring 1971 the plum trees, apricots and almonds that covered the site were uprooted to make way for a large new fabrication plant – and the company was ready to move its manufacturing operations into Santa Clara 1, as the new plant was to be called.

Other companies near by were expanding too. As the Bay Area became a magnet for the electronics industry new factories were rolling back the orchards that had covered the Santa Clara valley until the 1960s. As trees gave way to office buildings and fields to highways, a local reporter coined a new name for the area: Silicon Valley. The rise of Silicon Valley has been simultaneous with the rise of Intel.

Before the company could move to its new site, however, there was a small matter to deal with: its address. When Intel bought the property, the street bordering the site was known as Coffin Road, apparently named after one of the property developers who had owned it during recent years. This didn’t sound too auspicious for a company that saw its own survival as by no means certain. To make matters worse, the street was badly lit and foggy: it had already been the site of a number of car accidents. So Ann Bowers, newly hired as the company’s human resources manager, went to see the city fathers of Santa Clara to ask if it would be possible to change the street name. She was told that the matter would have to go before committee. After a little internal discussion with her colleagues, many of whom favoured names like Intel Way, Semiconductor Street and Memory Boulevard, she sent in a letter formally requesting the name change.

Three weeks later, shortly before the great move was to take place, Bob Noyce marched into her office at 7.30 one morning and dropped a sheet of paper on her desk. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ he demanded.

On the paper before her, Bowers saw an announcement from the Santa Clara city fathers which said that the street outside Intel’s new headquarters would henceforth be known as Bowers Avenue. Stammering, she told Noyce that it could only be a coincidence – that she had sent in the street-name request just as she had been told to. Some weeks later a local official explained to her that the city had chosen Bowers Avenue because that was the name of the continuation of the street on the other side of the expressway. But there seemed no reason to spoil a good story – so most of the company’s employees believed, for years afterwards, that Ann Bowers had so much influence in Santa Clara that she had managed to have the company’s permanent address named after her.

One of the more delicate tasks facing Ann Bowers was to find a secretary for Andy Grove. By March 1971 Intel’s director of operations had gone through a number of secretaries but still failed to find one that met his expectations. It had got to the point where Bowers would have to warn candidates for the position in advance that he was a difficult man to work with.

The first person who survived undaunted the process of being interviewed by Grove was a young Englishwoman named Sue McFarland. Brought over to California by an American husband, McFarland was working as a secretary in a financial software company. But her marriage had begun to crumble, and she had seriously considered going back to England to pick up her old life in the Worcestershire countryside. While she was thinking about it, though, McFarland had been told by a friend that Intel was a company that was going places – and she had sent in a letter of application.

Waiting in the lobby, Sue McFarland was met by a man with short, frizzy brown hair and very thick glasses, striding in from a corridor at high speed. He was wearing polyester trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt with an array of coloured pens in the pocket, and a broad, rather loud tie. ‘I am Andy Grove,’ he announced. ‘Please come through to my office.’

The office was austere, and lit by a single small window. There was barely room for the two of them; perhaps that was why Ann Bowers hadn’t followed them in. Covering the walls were dozens of charts, each filled in meticulously by hand using coloured ink, with incomprehensible acronyms on the axes. Switch on your professional smile, Sue. Look confident. Choose an opening line.

‘What do the graphs represent?’ she asked pleasantly.

‘Why do you want to know?’ Grove snapped back. Or rather: Vy-do-you-vant-to-know? His English was still strongly accented with Hungarian.

‘I’m curious,’ she continued, refusing to be thrown off her guard. ‘I know that you are in charge of operations, so I’m sure you must have industrial processes to keep an eye on. I’m interested to know what kind of things you are tracking.’

Grove explained, as if he expected her not to know already, that Intel Corporation was in the business of making semiconductors. ‘Semiconductors are materials that neither prevent the passage of electrical currents nor allow them to conduct as easily as through a copper wire, for instance …’ he continued.

Sue McFarland sat back in her chair, trying to concentrate on the mini-lecture that her interviewer had begun.

‘… This gives them certain behavioural characteristics that make them very useful in designing electrical circuits. But it also means they are sensitive to small changes in the manufacturing environment. Our business depends on being able to produce semiconductor devices in large volumes at high quality. Small changes in the production processes we use and the materials present when we build them can have dramatic effects on the percentage of the production run that is usable when we have finished. Higher yields mean that we have more products to sell from each production run, which means that our costs are lower. This in turn means that our profits are higher.’

‘I see,’ she replied.

‘But we are here to talk first about you. Tell me a little about your experience.’

It was when Sue McFarland explained that she was a qualified shorthand writer that Grove interrupted her. ‘Shorthand?’ he asked. ‘Not speedwriting? The difference is important, and speedwriting does not please me.’

‘Yes, I can write shorthand.’

‘Would you mind, then, if I were to check your skills by dictating a memo to you, having you take it down in shorthand, and asking you to type it?’

It was clear that the question was merely rhetorical. The candidate took a notebook and a pencil from her bag, replaced the bag at the side of her chair, and waited.

Oblivious to the difficulty caused by his Hungarian accent, Grove began to dictate a quick-fire memo to a number of members of his staff, dealing with a number of problems that had come up with a specific named manufacturing process. Sue McFarland had little trouble keeping up, but she felt she was translating the words of the memo into the dots and squiggles of shorthand like an automaton, understanding nothing of what she was writing. Why are you doing this? she thought. Why are you wasting your time and his? It was almost an interruption when Grove said, ‘That’s it’.

He got up from behind the desk, led her outside into the corridor, and showed her an electric typewriter on a small table. She wheeled the chair out from below, sat down, and rolled a fresh sheet of white paper into the machine. Taking a deep breath, she looked at her notes and prepared to begin. Then something made her glance over her shoulder.

Grove was still there, watching her – and he clearly had no intention of going away.

As she typed, the words on the page blurred in and out of focus. People clattered past on the linoleum of the narrow corridor. All the time, Grove stood behind her, watching her as the memo appeared line by line. Ninety per cent of it was right. Considering the circumstances, she said to herself, you’re not doing badly at all.

By the time the memo was finished Sue McFarland had regained her self-possession. She pulled the paper smoothly out of the typewriter, and swung around in her chair as she handed it to her interviewer. She gave him her coolest look. ‘Feel free to fill in the blanks,’ she said.

It was too much to expect that he would merely glance at the paper. Back in the office, Grove sat down at his desk, and studied the memo intently for three, maybe even four minutes. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is not entirely correct, but you have made a good attempt. I will be happy to offer you the job.’

Sue McFarland felt the quiet thump of the heart that comes with a sudden piece of exciting news. She felt herself able to relax for the first time that morning. But it was not in the nature of a well-trained Englishwoman to jump up and perform a victory dance. Instead, she simply smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

‘Ann Bowers will make the necessary arrangements for your salary and your entry pass to get into the building. When can you start?’ ‘I’ll have to think a little about that, Dr Grove.’

‘Call me Andy. We use first names in this company.’

A week into the job, Sue McFarland received a shock as she hung up her coat. Her new boss called her into his office, and sat her down in front of him. ‘You’ve been late three times,’ he said.

Sue McFarland looked at her watch. It was shortly after 8.10. The company’s official starting-time was eight o’clock, just like her last job. In her old company, she had always come in some time between 8.15 and 8.30, and nobody had complained.

‘Work at Intel starts at eight o’clock,’ said Grove. ‘I expect everyone in the company to be here at that time, ready to do business.’

McFarland gulped.

‘How can I expect the rest of the staff to do this if my own secretary comes in late?’

She left the room shaking.

OK, she said to herself after she had pulled herself together. Do we want to work under this pressure, or do we want to go and look for something else?

Sue McFarland was nothing if not a fighter. This might be her first introduction to Grove’s Hungarian work ethic, but she resolved there and then to treat it as a character-building experience.

Over the succeeding weeks Grove began to reveal further glimpses into his character. The office, dark and small as it may have been, was scrupulously tidy. The filing system that Grove had managed himself until then, but now wanted McFarland to take over for him, was a model of simplicity: all paperwork, except certain regular production reports, was filed immediately under the name of the sender. Incoming mail and memoranda were to be sorted by her and put into three piles: one for ‘action required’, one for ‘important information’, and one for ‘background information’. McFarland was to screen Grove’s calls as well as she could, always asking people who wanted to speak to him exactly what they wanted, and taking very detailed messages in a standard form. His day consisted of a number of meetings punctuated by periods when he would work alone in his office with the door shut, and shorter periods when he would call her into his office to take dictation. Every week or so they would sit down for fifteen minutes to discuss priorities for the period coming up. All meetings in Grove’s office were to start on time, and the door would be closed five minutes after the starting time. No interruptions were to take place, unless Noyce or Moore insisted on talking to him.

Once her propensity to oversleep had been dealt with, McFarland soon began to turn into a model secretary. Grove particularly admired her soft English accent, and her precise manners and dress. But as an immigrant who had learned English as a second language, he prided himself on his command of grammar and syntax – and watched like a hawk for any mistakes in her typing. One day he handed back a memo she had just typed, with a word circled in thick red ink.

‘What’s wrong with this?’ she asked him.

‘It says exemplified,’ said Grove. ‘The verb comes from the noun example. You should have spelled it examplified.’

Sue McFarland gave the smile of a native speaker who knows that, for every rule in the English language, there was always at least one exception. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘Here, let me look it up.’

She handed the office dictionary across to Grove, her eyes twinkling with good humour at the opportunity to demonstrate that the boss was not always right.

He threw the dictionary at her.

If there was one point that Grove was keen to impress on Sue McFarland, it was that she worked for Intel, not for him. ‘I just happen to be your supervisor at the moment,’ he’d say. Nothing made him more angry than to hear that an executive had asked his secretary to take his suit to the dry-cleaners, or to buy a birthday present for his wife. But there was one occasion when this principle collided inconveniently with the iron rule of promptness. Grove rushed into the office one day, having returned from a meeting outside the building, and threw McFarland his car keys. ‘Please park my car,’ he said. ‘I’m running late for my next meeting.’

She took special pleasure in finding a space at the very far end of the parking lot, making sure that he would have the longest possible walk back to his car at the end of the day.

Occasionally Grove sent her down to the company cafeteria to bring him some food, and spent the lunch hour dictating memos to her. The food he asked for was always the same dish: cottage cheese and fruit. He prided himself on maintaining his weight at the same level it had been when he was in college. After a few days of this McFarland had had enough. ‘Keep this up,’ she said, ‘and I’ll leave the office in order to take the hour that I’m entitled to. And you’ll have to get your own lunch.’

But the two got on better and better. Sue McFarland realized that Andy Grove, for all his ferocious demand for precision, had awakened a tendency in her own character in the same direction. Always polite and proper, she liked things to be done correctly too. He began to refer to her as HMOS – Her Majesty, the Operations Secretary. He began to display a sense of humour, too. Three months into her new job, she stubbed her toe against a desk and swore. Grove appealed to the heavens. ‘Thank God!’ he said. ‘She’s human.’ Little did he realize that his secretary’s Mistress Mouse manner was more a function of the initial terror with which she viewed him than of her own personality.

Gradually, he began to trust her with greater responsibility. Not content with the three category piles for incoming mail, Grove asked her to go through his correspondence, highlighting key phrases with a yellow pen so that he would be able to scan the pages more quickly.

Once in a while, there was a pinprick to remind her what a tough man he was to work for. On Christmas Eve 1971 Grove left the Santa Clara office just after lunch to go across to Mountain View for a meeting. Sue McFarland continued to work, finishing most of the jobs in front of her by half-past three. There was no sign of Grove. Shortly after four a colleague strolled into her office and asked her what her plans were for the holiday. Heck, she thought. It may be Thursday, but it’s Christmas Eve. Ten minutes later she was in her car, on the way home.

The following Monday she arrived back at work promptly at five to eight. Grove was already in the office, stony-faced and waiting for her. ‘Christmas Day is a holiday,’ he said, ‘but Christmas Eve is a workday. I came back to find you absent. In future, I’ll expect you and everyone else in the company to stay at work until our normal closing time.’

The following year Grove made a pre-emptive strike to avoid misunderstandings. He sent around a memo to all Intel’s employees, reminding them not to cut their last afternoon before the holiday. This became an annual institution in the company, known as the ‘Scrooge memo’, and it irritated people mightily. When she returned from the holiday, Sue McFarland would often find an in-box bulging with copies of the memo which their recipients had sent back to Grove annotated with nasty comments:

‘May you eat yellow snow,’ said one of them.

The same year Andy Grove presented Sue McFarland with her first bad performance review:

As my job grows [he wrote in his most professorial tone], Sue could be of increasing use to me by relieving me of many activities, from arranging dinners and bookbinding to efficient and prompt pursuit of office details, any of which may seem trivial but which if not done and well done distract me from what should more properly occupy my attention. Sue has the ability to handle all this and more, but evidently lacks the interest or the ambition to do so. I find this a pity; her capabilities will not be utilized more fully and as a result her usefulness to me and therefore to Intel will remain limited. For this reason, her compensation will also have to remain at its present level.

When he presented this review to her, neatly typed on a piece of company stationery, Sue McFarland burst into tears. Shocked and crestfallen, Grove did not know what to do. He walked stiffly across the room, took a Kleenex out of the box, and handed it to her. She dried her eyes, stood up, put on her coat, and walked out without a word. Terrified that his wonderful secretary would resign, Grove’s first reaction was to call Ann Bowers to ask her advice on this delicate matter of human resources. Bowers’s assistant explained that she was away from work, having a minor operation, but Grove would not be put off. A few minutes later he had tracked her down by phone to her hospital bed. He asked Bowers what he should do.

‘You should have thought of that before you wrote the review,’ she replied tartly.

The following morning Sue McFarland returned to work to find a funny get-well card on her desk. Grove might have hoped that this sign of contrition would close the matter. But he underestimated her. By the end of the day a memo in reply to the performance review was on Grove’s desk, drafted without a hint of the emotional turmoil McFarland had displayed the previous day. In it, she explained that the growth of the company was making it harder and harder for her to keep up with her existing responsibilities, let alone take on new ones. The progress report for March 1971 was forty-two pages long, she pointed out; by October 1972 it weighed in at ninety-seven pages. All the new professional employees required her to write technical reports, she explained, all of which she had dealt with in a timely fashion. During the period, Intel had set up new assembly plants in three Far Eastern locations. Once again, this had increased her workload; once again, she reminded him, all her assignments had been completed in a timely fashion. She ended the memo by putting in a request for an assistant to be hired who could take much of the typing burden off her shoulders.

Grove granted the request.

‘One could not allow oneself to be intimidated by Andy,’ she remarked afterwards, ‘or one would be squashed. He would tend to treat people as doormats if they behaved like doormats.

‘Not only myself, but everyone else who reported to him, we were constantly forced to make a decision. Do we want to continue to do this? Are we going to subject ourselves to this criticism? Are we going to keep pushing ourselves to do more and more? For a variety of reasons, the answer was “yes”.’

One of those reasons was straightforward. Sue McFarland didn’t just like Andy Grove. She admired him hugely. Grove was a brilliant problem-solver, a fanatical master of detail, and a man with an absolute determination to master the difficult technical projects Intel had embarked on. He drove everyone else hard, but he drove himself harder still. ‘I learned more from him than from anyone else I ever worked with before or since,’ she said.