Resentment, Jealousy, Feuds: A Look at Intel’s Founding Team – Michael S. Malone – Harvard Business Review

Just when you think you understand the trio (as I thought I did up until my final interview with Grove) you learn something new that turns everything upside-down. The Intel Trinity must be considered one of the most successful teams in business history, yet it seems to violate all the laws of successful teams.

via Resentment, Jealousy, Feuds: A Look at Intel’s Founding Team – Michael S. Malone – Harvard Business Review.

Agreed, this is a topic near and dear to my heart as I’ve collectively read a number of the stories published over the years from the Tech Press. From Tracy Kidder‘s, Soul of a New Machine, to Fred Brook’s The Miracle Man Month, Steven Levy’s Insanely Great. The story of Xerox PARC as told in Dealer’s of Lightning, the Arpanet Project as told in Where Wizards Stay Up Late. And moving somewhat along those lines, Stewart Brand’s The Media Lab and Howard Rheingold’s Virtual Reality. All of these are studies at some level of organizational theory in the high technology field.

And one thing you find commonly is there’s one charismatic individual that joins up at some point (early or late doesn’t matter) who then brings in a flood of followers and talent that is the kick in the pants that really gets momentum going. The problem is with a startup company say like Intel or its predecessor, Fairchild Semiconductor, there’s more than one charismatic individual. And keeping that organization stitched together even just loosely is probably the biggest challenge of all. So I’ll be curious to read this book Michael Malone and see how it compares to the other books in my anthology of organization theory in high tech. Should be a good, worthwhile read.

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