Insider Management at Every Level

“Another observation I had about TI was that its upper management was quite proficient in semiconductor technology. Usually, in a technology company, the grassroots staff have specialized knowledge, but the upper levels are not necessarily experts. TI in the 1950s, however, was a semiconductor company where people at all levels were insiders.”

“It now seems that from the 1950s to the 1970s, TI enjoyed more than twenty years of prosperity in the semiconductor industry. There were, of course, many factors, but the professional caliber of the top management in the early period was indeed one of them. Unfortunately, the seeds of failure are often planted within success. As a company gradually grows larger, the internal and external matters of top leaders gradually increase, but most of them have nothing to do with technology. In order to “handle countless affairs every day,” they themselves become disconnected from rapidly advancing technology. Take Shabert as an example: in the 1950s he was a semiconductor expert; in the 1960s he was promoted to executive vice president in charge of the company’s overall business and began to gradually lose touch with semiconductors; by the 1970s, he had become a layman in semiconductors. Even more sadly, he himself did not know he had become disconnected, and still believed that the semiconductor industry of the 1970s was the same as it had been twenty years earlier.”