Boardroom Despatches: Inside Intel

Some people think Craig Barrett is the pen pusher guiding the inevitable success of a tech stalwart. How wrong they are, writes Rene Carayol.

Recently I had the pleasure of hosting an evening where the top brass from the UK retail sector met one of high-tech's most high-profile and influential CEOs, Intel's Craig Barrett. What an experience.

I want to talk about his leadership style, what we might learn from it and what it says about the company he represents but first let me mention a few of his other individual plus points.

You know the type of schedule a visiting exec usually has, especially those from outside Europe not wanting a wasted five minutes. Well Barrett is in that league and then some. He was doing eight countries in seven days but here's what struck me first - with that kind of executive on that kind of itinerary there is normally no warmth, no recognition. That wasn't the case with him.

Holding court with the assembled business leaders, his theme was leading Intel out of recession. Now we know the semiconductor industry is a little different to most others but he pointed out he has lived through 10 recessions. How has Intel come out of them? By investing its way out.

We're talking about heavy-duty R&D investment, for one thing. This year it will be in the region of $7-$8bn. Only a few companies have 'A' list R&D budgets - some telcos and the likes of Cisco, HP, IBM, Microsoft and Sun - but perhaps more importantly for Barrett and Intel, only a handful of tech companies make the massive profits. Dell, Microsoft and Intel are in that league, with Intel's margins incredibly high for a hardware company.

But maintaining that kind of leading position, forever beating off rivals at your heels, normally means a defensive strategy. That's certainly something I'm inclined - though unhappy - to predict would happen in the UK.

But for Intel, 80 per cent of its profits at the end of a year come from products that weren't there at the start of the year. That's an incredibly fast pace and no organisation that I know of in Europe is that brave.

What also makes Barrett interesting is his background. He was born in 1939, educated at Stanford and then became a professor at that university. He joined Intel as a technology development manager in 1974 and has stayed with the chip-maker ever since.

My point is: even if you're a geek, you can still rise to high office. It's about attitude more than skills and training. And he has the right attitude. Sure, he is affable, but he has a steely resolve.

I asked him about the environment at Intel. Of course he said it is very supportive but then he mentioned it is really about three things: results, results, results. (And I sensed from his colleagues that they know what's expected.)

Watching and listening to him, I really started to wonder if we could see the equivalent leader in Europe, someone who has gone from academic to motivational leader.

Sticking to large companies - and ones in tech to boot - the comparison I'd like to make is with SAP founder Hasso Plattner. Now I did a similar customer event with SAP last year and the differences are quite obvious. Plattner and the other executives now running that ERP vendor have done a difficult job to keep the company where it is. In my view they have been helped by Oracle and PeopleSoft taking their eyes off the ball but still, SAP had to hold on to that wheel for enterprise software.

Although it's also necessary in Intel's field, SAP is really into process. I sense Intel will launch and learn - and, if needs be, fail fast. SAP will go from alpha to beta, back to alpha, then back to beta and more testing. There's nothing massively wrong with that but we must all understand the implications of measured and deliberate growth.

This is not an anti-SAP message but about how we need to approach business if we want explosive growth in the UK and rest of Europe.

Who else is there in Europe, with the experience, passion and nous to lead a company forward like an Intel, to create another technology player to rival the best from the US or East Asia? Chris Gent has gone at Vodafone and, like his successor, there are others for whom the best we can say is that the jury is out.

Intel, meanwhile, continues with a man in his early sixties looking ravenously hungry. But they need not fear about what comes next, just as when Andy Grove moved over to chairman and Barrett came in. COO Paul Otellini has already been anointed as CEO-elect.

They're a real class act of a company and one boardrooms the world over can learn from.