Intel From Behind the Curtain 109
Good Morning Silicon Valley writes "So now that we've reached this postmodern understanding that all official corporate communication is, if not a charade, part of a ritualized dance where meaning must be divined between the lines, where do you turn to hear an executive talk straight? Why, to his or her blog, of course. Even more candid than the still-rare public executive blog is one meant just for internal consumption, and that's what makes Intel President Paul Otellini's postings such interesting reading. The Mercury News snagged a copy of Otellini's 8-week-old blog and found it full of frank interaction with employees on strategic initiatives and the competition."
About AMD (Score:2, Insightful)
Do ya think?
"Straight Talk"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OK, all Intel employees raise their hands! (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean that sort of setup is just begging for trouble.
It is still censored (Score:5, Insightful)
Moreover, especially with the ever-increasing threat of lawsuits, people are more and more careful what they put in writing in any context at all, and companies have learned that digital words are more dangerous than words on paper.
Now, if there were transcripts of a converstion between two executives that were good friends, and not rivals in any way, completely trusted each other, and were slightly drunk, they would be interesting transcripts.
Most interesting would be words written where the guy thought that NO ONE else would EVER see them.
In Soviet Russia... (Score:4, Insightful)
In Soviet Russia, people reached that understanding decades ago for all official corporations. Obviously, they were far ahead of their time. Of course, the poor suckers didn't have much of a choice than to figure it out--their lives depended on it every day; for us, most of the time, the consequence of figuring out corporate messages just comes down to whether we buy Coke or Pepsi.
Seriously, this is no coincidence: modern political propaganda was invented during WWI in the US by people like Bernays. After WWI, the now out-of-work folks started writing books and selling their services to the private sector. Their "Torches of Freedom" campaign made smoking instantly acceptable for women (even though Bernays himself already believed that smoking was bad and forbade his daughter to smoke). Goebbels picked up Bernays's methods for the Nazis (from Bernay's published works), and I suspect the communist movement used it as well. After that, this has been pretty much the standard way for any large organization to communicate with rest of us--it is standard textbook stuff.
You think the employees get the truth? (Score:5, Insightful)
The City got a rather different speech - verging on apologising for the poor results, it was very much lower-key.
Which is more accurate? Well, I'm no accountant or investor, but the results didn't look that great to me. The point is that just because something's said internally doesn't make it true, *especially* when it's communicated to the employees in general.
Re:"Straight Talk"? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's pretty common - we had a number of speeches and other internal communications where I work a year or two ago about how we had to become "more customer focussed", amongst other things. None of them were expected to be seen publicly; executives really do just talk and think that way.
Look at it this way - no executive or manager is going to tell their staff to care *less* about customers, are they?
*Internal* blog, so why are we reading it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:OK, all Intel employees raise their hands! (Score:3, Insightful)
I do note that nowadays the blog is prefaced with the standard legal mumbo-jumbo about "forward-looking statements".
Re:Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:*Internal* blog, so why are we reading it? (Score:4, Insightful)
That is not the case here, but I'm speaking directly to your statement.
Further, as the head of one biggest names in technology, you can't hope for anything you write down for mass consumtion NOT to be spread around. It's the nature of the beast. Surely intel exec, more than anyone else, would understand this.
This is just a cleverly craft bit of PR.
Running Scared of Apple? Silly! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:"Straight Talk"? (Score:2, Insightful)
No, but they could at least try to come up with something meaningful to say. Nobody but a manager really knows what becoming "more customer focused" really means. What a mmanager might say is something like "stop making silly, mocking faces while talking to customers on the phone and don't assume they are morons." But then again, maybe scolding employees isn't the best motivating force.
-matthew
We can't all be cool (Score:2, Insightful)
Note-I make no claims to know anything about being cool!
Customer Focused? (Score:3, Insightful)
I read the responses also, and one person hit it on the head. They site Apple as making cool products and Intel as making products that other people use to make "cool" products. Does Intel really want to get in to the same market as Apple? If so then are they going to write software for their products also? What about their OS? What OS are they going to use? Lots of questions and how they answer them depends on how much they piss off Microsoft and others.
Heck I have an idea for Intel. How about making the best X86 and X86-64 for the money? I will give you the mobile market for now. Then look at where the bottleneck is the current systems (memory) and do something about it. RAMBUS was not the answer!!! Adding more and more cache is not the answer either. You have around 12 BILLION in R&D and you let AMD beat you in your core business?? If you couldn't force Dell and others to not ship AMD systems then you would probably be in a world of hurt, but how long can you continue your stranglehold (illegal monopoly practace)?
Lastly I want to say again... You have BILLIONS in R&D. Come up with the best product.
Re:"Customer Focus" (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't have too. Always have.
> It would be wonderful, except the nature of brilliant geeks is not to solve other peoples' problems, but to work on things that interest them.
BZZZT! Thanks for playing. In my experience the problem comes down to the mgt. insisting on the band-aid approach and nothing but the band-aid approach. I've seen many a 'quick fix' go in ending up being a permenant solution. Yeah, it mad the phone stop ringing for the particular problem, but ends up causing further problems down the road.
Taking the 'geek' side a little more here (and, again, this is my experience), it isn't a matter of what 'interests them,' but of solving the actual problem. It really is sad how often the moral equivelant of 'direct stderr to
Now, to be fair, there are times when the effort to get to the root of the problem is not cost effective (for lack of a better term). Again, in my experience, balancing these is what will make the difference between real innovation and mediocrity.
I could almost agree with your arguement if it won't for this premise.....
Re:"Customer Focus" (Score:3, Insightful)
Really this shouldn't be seen as management knows whats right vs. geeks know what's right. The issue is that management needs more technology sophistication and geeks need more business sophistication.