Inside Intel. Tim Jackson

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.