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Pat Gelsinger was wrong for Intel
By all accounts, Pat Gelsinger is affable, technically sharp, hard-working, and decent. Those who have worked for him praise him as a singularly good manager.
And while the cullings are not always wrong (no amount of patience would have saved the iAPX 432), the biggest mistakes in the last two decades at Intel (namely, its failures in mobile CPUs and discrete GPUs) are a result of discarding a flawed effort entirely rather than learning from it and iterating. Intel needed a leader that could confront this cultural problem directly — who could work to undo an accretion of generations of entitlement — but if Gelsinger’s narrative for himself was any indicator, it felt like he would instead be feeding the company’s worst impulses about its own exceptionalism. While I think his dichotomy is a bit reductive, Ben Horowitz’s nomenclature is useful here: Intel needed a wartime CEO — but in maintaining a dividend that it couldn’t afford, Gelsinger was committing the ultimate peacetime act.
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