Intel is getting personal.
The world's largest chipmaker is playing catch-up in mobile technology, having arrived late to the market for smartphones and tablets. Since chief executive Brian Krzanich took Intel's top job in 2013 he's remade the company's strategy, focusing on identifying new markets and understanding the consumer.
Brian Krzanich
Age
: 54
Title
: Chief executive officer
Education
: Bachelor’s degree in chemistry from San Jose State University
Career
: Joined Intel as an engineer in New Mexico in 1982 and advanced to a succession of increasingly senior roles in its manufacturing group, including plant manager in Massachusetts and oversight of the company’s key manufacturing operations. Named chief operating officer in 2012 and CEO in May 2013.
Family
: Married with two daughters, ages 15 and 13
That is manifest in new "Intel Experience" showcase the Silicon Valley company is opening in 50 Best Buy stores across the country, starting with one that debuted this week in a location near Clackamas Town Center. Krzanich flew to Oregon – home to 17,500 Intel employees – to see the new display for himself Saturday.
"How do you get people in a retail environment to actually understand what's new and what's (possible)?" Krzanich said. "We thought that what you couldn't do is leave them flat on the table."
Afterward, Krzanich spoke with The Oregonian about the new retail effort and his strategic overhaul of the company, answered questions about how he won the CEO job and challenges Intel faces as it adopts smaller circuit sizes. He also took on the hot topic of how women should approach their tech careers.
(The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.)
I gather there's an origin story for this retail display, a serendipitous meeting?
It was about a year ago. I was in New York – we had pop-up stores in three locations, New York, Chicago and LA. I was in the New York one and Hubert Joly, who is the CEO of Best Buy, and his son happened to be walking in the street, saw the Intel pop-up store, walked in. We met and he liked the experience aspect of this, where you're not just selling things on a display. You're getting people to experience it.
Everyone thinks of Intel and Intel Inside, you've got the label on the computers so everyone knows it's running on an Intel processor. As you move into more devices, wearable computing and the like, how do you envision conveying the Intel brand to people?
You have to do two things, and that's what's changing. One is you can't use the sticker. Nobody wants a sticker on their wearable bracelet. But you do boot it up, you do have to go charge it someplace. So we can put our brand on other things – the boot-up screen, the charger itself.
In the maker community, you have to get out and you have to go meet those people. (The maker movement is a tech-oriented, do-it-yourself culture focused on innovation.) They have to trust that you're there, not as a corporation but as a maker yourself. I go to a half-dozen maker faires a year myself. My (15-year-old) daughter participates in hackathons. We were at the Berkeley hackathon two weeks ago.
How do you convey to the company, inside the company, what's changing?
A. You spend a lot of time in front of the company. So for the first few months (as CEO) I traveled the world and spent time in front of the employees. I just spend a lot of time out talking to them every quarter.
A lot of the Intel employees are here because I told them on Tuesday in our business update that I'd be here and said: Come by and see me on Saturday at the Clackamas store.
Even if you look at the management team: 40 percent of the people in the top leadership at Intel have been there in less than a year. Almost 25 percent are from outside the company.
I had a conversation with Chairman Andy Bryant last spring and asked him: When he was looking for a new CEO, what was he looking for? And he said Intel needed someone to lead a culture change. Do you agree? Did Intel need a change? And if so, why was someone from within the company the right one to make the change?
The best way to make change is to know how something works. If you're going to go build something or change whatever it is, if you don't know how it works and you're trying to go make a change in it, the first thing you're doing is you're spending time figuring out how it works. The same thing happens in organizations.
I absolutely knew how Intel worked, but I absolutely also believed that Intel needed to change. We needed to become much more product focused. We need to be much more focused on the end consumer experience and get more of an outside-in perspective and open ourselves up to the way the world's working. I think we expected the world come to us.
So you've seen us put out more products this year than every before, push RealSense (3D scanning technology) into the market quite a bit earlier than we thought we would. We made deals in China to really open up the China market.
I am conscious of that. I learned that in the factories. (Krzanich is a former Intel factory manager.) When you're in the factories you're an engineer and you think you know all the answers, but actually there's a technician that runs that machine everyday. I learned to listen to those people because as an engineer, trying to fix it, if I listened to them they would tell me something that I wouldn't otherwise get and I would get it up-and-running faster and get home.
I've heard a couple different things about the CEO selection process, and how you ended up pairing with Renée James (a veteran Intel Oregon executive, whom Krzanich promoted to president when he go the top job.) Can you tell me how you two came together on that?
As we were going through the process the final step, once they'd gotten the two of us and then a couple of outsiders, was to present a strategy for the company. They gave you a mentor, one inside and one outside. And the inside one was Richard Taylor, our head of HR. And the outside one was a consultant who still works with us.
And a few weeks before we were going to present this both the consultant and Richard sat down and told us: You ought to share your strategies because they're almost identical. You use different words, but you have the same vision of where you want to take this place.
Intel in Best Buy
Intel will demonstrate new technologies in 50 Best Buy stores around the country, including three in Oregon (the one near Clackamas Town Center, one in Springfield and one at Cascade Station near PDX.)
The "Intel Experience" will refresh with new exhibits three times a year. Intel monitors store traffic to see what type of people are interested and how they interact with the technology.
The current display features an array of laptops and tablets for sale, enabling the technology on display:
3-D imaging and printing
: Using an Intel-based touchscreen laptop, shoppers design their own model of a robot.
"Augmented reality"
: Shoppers use Intel-based tablets to design and race a Mars rover on a screen that augments their surroundings with elements from the game.
DJ remixing
: Shoppers modify a track by Ne-Yo on an Intel-based tablet, managing stage lighting while the song plays.
At that point we decided: Instead of fighting against each other let's fight against the outside guys. Let's team up, let's make this as good as we can. And then may the best person win.
When I got through that (and won the CEO job) I decided: Who better to help you than the person who had the same vision and image?
Your counterpart at Microsoft, CEO Satya Nadella, has gotten a lot of attention for comments he made about women seeking raises. (Nadella advised women not to ask for raises, but to have "faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along." He has since apologized, admitting that he "underestimated exclusion and bias" in the workplace.)
So I'll ask you: What advice would you give a woman thinking about a raise? How should she approach that, and how should she think about it?
I give the same advice to women and men about that. I tell them that there are three mistakes that people make in their careers, and that those three mistakes limit their potential growth.
The first mistake is not having a five-year plan. I meet so many people who say: I just want to contribute. But that doesn't necessarily drive you to where you want to go in your career. You have to know: Where do you want to be? What do you want to accomplish? Who do you want to be in five years?
The second mistake is not telling somebody. If you don't go talk to your boss, if you don't go talk to your mentors, if you don't go talk to people who can influence where you want to be, then they don't know. And they're not mind readers.
The third thing is you have to have a mentor. You have to have someone who's watching out, helping you navigate the decision-making processes, how things get done, how you're perceived from a third-party view.
After that you can now have a discussion. When you want a raise you're not only going in saying: I want more money. You're going in and saying: Here's what I want out of my career. Here's what I accomplished. Here's what I said I was going to do. Here's what I've done. Not only do I deserve more money but I want to get to here on my career.
Because what you really want is to build a career, not just get the raise. And if you do those things, whether you're a man or a woman, you'll be a lot better off.
Women, they need to get paid equal. We go through the data all the time as a company and make sure they're advancing.
You have some background in the fabs (a fab is a computer chip factory). It's a big interest up here – it's the heart of Intel's research. It's the heart of Intel's manufacturing. The transition to new, 14 nanometer seemed like a bit of a struggle (the 14nm chips were delayed for months while Intel reduced the number of manufacturing defects and are only hitting the market now). Do you feel like that's the new normal as you move to smaller circuit sizes?
It's getting harder. You're facing the longest span in our industry's history between real improvements in lithography. We would have liked to have had EUV (extreme ultraviolet, a promising but troubled new manufacturing technology) already. You're reaching the point where defects are so critical. The designs are getting so complex.
I believe the difficulties we saw at 14 nanometers are not going to be unusual. They are getting harder each node, absolutely. There are things we're doing at 10 nanometers to help that, learn from our mistakes. But I still anticipate it's going to be hard.
Is that an obstacle for you, or a competitive advantage? (Intel is building a $6 billion research factory in Hillsboro, and is one of the few chip companies that integrates new chip designs with new manufacturing technologies.)
The real competitive advantage is not just how hard it was but the relationship between the design team and silicon has gotten much, much tighter. You can't solve these problems without both of them making a change, real time. The fact that we have the silicon guys and the design guys in the same room all focused, I think that's a real advantage.
Do you think the end customer will have a different impression of Intel five years from now?
I truly believe we can make products that bring experience that they didn't think were possible, or they thought were in the future.
The tablets we bring out next year with the full 3D RealSense camera, that's amazing what you can do with that. You can take any object you can think of and turn that into a completely textured and dimensionally correct object that you can modify, you can 3D-print, you can do anything. You'll see drones that have RealSense cameras and computers in them so they actually see and think. You don't worry about GPS signals.
You showed off new Intel headphones at the Consumer Electronics Show last January, with a heart-rate monitor.
I use them every night (his Twitter handle is @bkrunner).
You may have heard running's kind of a big deal in Oregon – what kind of running do you do?
Not enough anymore. I call myself a slow runner that goes long distances. I like to go for long, slow runs. I haven't run competitively for about two years, since I had this job. The last big competitive run I did was Imogene Pass, which is in Colorado. (The Imogene Pass Run follows a 17.1-mile course in Colorado's San Juan mountains, connecting the towns of Ouray and Telluride over a 13,000-foot pass.)
But that was four years ago.
-- Mike Rogoway; twitter: @rogoway; 503-294-7699