Muar-born Tan Lip-Bu is new CEO of Intel

New Intel Corp CEO Tan Lip-Bu. — Photo courtesy of Intel

PETALING JAYA: Malaysian-born Tan Lip-Bu (Americanised to Lip-Bu Tan) has been appointed chief executive officer (CEO) of troubled technology firm Intel Corp, effective March 18, with many industry observers aching to see what strategies the new boss has in place to turn around the chip giant.

He takes over from Pat Gelsinger, three months after the company veteran was forced out by Intel’s board because his costly and ambitious plan to improve the firm’s performance was seen as faltering and sapping investor confidence.

Notably, Tan’s appointment will also attract the attention of Donald Trump, with the US president eager for Intel to rebound in his push for more manufacturing in the country, threatening tariffs on imports that have roiled global markets for weeks.

Independent analyst Jack Gold told Reuters that Tan would be able to leverage his experience and especially his industry connections, while pursuing excellence within Intel. 

“Hopefully the board will stay out of his way as he makes the necessary changes,” Gold said.

Tan moves in the same social circle as Lisa Su from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, two artificial intelligence (AI) chip leaders who, according to Reuters, had been pitched to invest in Intel.

Born in Muar in 1959, Tan grew up in Singapore and was educated there, graduating from Nanyang University with a Bachelor of Science degree, majoring in Physics. He later completed a Master of Science in nuclear engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.

Now a naturalised American, Tan began his doctoral studies in nuclear engineering at MIT, before moving to the University of San Francisco in California, where he graduated with a Master of Business Administration and founded venture capital firm Walden International in 1987.

A former Intel board member himself, he had been seen as a contender for the CEO’s post thanks to his deep experience in the chip industry and his status as a long-time technology investor in promising startups.

For example, he took a stake in Annapurna Labs, a startup later purchased by Amazon.com Inc for US$370mil that has become the heart of its inhouse chip division.

He also invested in Nuvia, which Qualcomm bought for US$1.4bil in 2021, making it a central part of its push to compete with Intel in the laptop and PC chip markets.

Tan remains actively involved with startups that could either become competitors or acquisition targets for Intel, exemplified by the fact that earlier this week he invested in AI photonic startup Celestial AI, which is backed by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices.

In a letter to Intel employees on Wednesday, Tan said: “Together, we will work hard to restore Intel’s position as a world-class products company, establish ourselves as a world-class foundry and delight our customers like never before.”

Intel shares surged 12% in extended trading on Wednesday, and analysts welcomed the move which they said was likely to bring some stability to the chipmaker.

The company’s stock had declined by 60% in 2024.

From 2009 to 2021, Tan was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, a chip design software firm whose fortunes he revived by focusing Cadence around supplying the software for sophisticated designs and partnering closely with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), which from its founding days swore it would focus only on manufacturing.

During Tan’s time at Cadence, the firm’s stock appreciated 3,200% and it landed Apple as one of its largest customers, as the iPhone maker shifted away from suppliers such as Intel and toward its own chips.

Cadence’s tools also became central to chip industry firms such as Broadcom, which helps Google, Amazon and others design their own AI chips and have them made by TSMC.

“He did a really good job of pointing (Cadence) in the right direction. Cadence really aligned itself with TSMC – they saw them as a leader and the go-to shop,” Karl Freund, an analyst with Cambrian AI Research, told Reuters.

Intel is undergoing a historic transition as it attempts to emerge from one of its bleakest periods.

While struggling to cash in on a boom in investment in advanced AI chips that has fired up the fortunes of market leader Nvidia and other chipmakers, the company is spending heavily to become a contract manufacturer of chips for other companies, leading some investors to worry about pressure on its cash flow.

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MBA today is disrupting the competition?

The in word in business school today is disruption

AFTER seven weeks of cool spring weather, our Malaysian sun finally arrived in Boston. As I basked in the warm sunshine in the courtyard of McArthurs Hall, Harvard Business School (HBS), a gentle breeze reminded me of Awana Genting back to 2004, where I last enrolled in a two-week HBS management programme organised by our Malaysian HBS Alumni Club. Four HBS professors taught us then.

Here I am, eight years later, being taught by no less than 15 senior Harvard professors covering almost 120 case studies and numerous lectures. To justify their hefty fees, HBS threw their full arsenal of specialist professors at us. From basic strategy, finance, marketing subjects to deal making negotiation to social media to entrepreneurship. We have had the presence of former and current CEOs of Merck, Cisco, Carl Zeiss and many others attending our discussions on their company followed by their explanation and defence on their course of actions/decision making as per their case study.

Today, we covered the Facebook case study to coincide with its listing. And we had the director of FBI giving us a lecture after attending the case study on FBI reorganisation after Sept 11. To say that I am impressed would be an understatement.

It was like a Hollywood movie. There must be at least 10 FBI agents with their standard issued earpiece and dark suits staring at us at the entrance and exit. And then a standing ovation at the end of the speech to send off The Director. Captain America has saved the universe again.

HBS is the post graduate business school of the Harvard University. It has arguably the most revered MBA programme in the world. With a fixed annual enrolment of 900 students, an applicant has a 7% success rate and he or she will be at least 27 years old with an average of four years working experience. It is a two-year programme with full residential accommodation provided in campus. Depending on ones preferred living standards, the expected investment should be between US$160,000 and US$200,000 (RM480,000 and RM600,000) over two years.

It is in the executive education that HBS has amazed me the most. They have built a business model that is difficult to replicate when in the world, all kinds of education business is being commoditised. They have differentiated themselves in terms of positioning, reputation and school fees. High, higher, highest.

HBS is a money making machine. They have built an organisation that is always evolving, very sensitive to the external environment. If necessary, they are not afraid to modify their strategy, realign people, structure, processes and their unique culture to face the new environment. All the time, staying close to their core strategy of providing a unique learning experience to their target market. They practise what they preach.

Sensitive to change

So are you sensitive to the changing environment' When do you think is a good time for your organisation to adjust your strategy and realign your organisation to face new challenges' Is it during the good times or only when your organisation is in intensive care'

On hindsight, just look at Malaysia Airlines over the last 15 years. What do you think the management should have done then' When Southwest Airlines and Ryanair in the United States and Europe respectively have successfully taken their markets by storm, they should not have ignored the threat set by AirAsia. When you see air ticket prices being commoditised, you will be flying into a smaller gross margin zone. Which means you need a leaner and lower cost structured organisation to face a new challenging environment. So what do you think happened' And is their current organisational cost structure lean enough to face even tougher challenges today' We will find out within 15 months.

In the current world where many products and services are moving towards commoditisation, how are you differentiating your products and services from the competition' More importantly, how do you continue to differentiate to stay ahead of your competition' Look at Astro. From a virtual stranglehold grip on cable TV market, their monopoly status has been threatened by new entrants offering lower cost options straight to your homes. Astros response must be swift and decisive. As a true market leader, Astro should pre-empt and disrupt the competition. With new technology and smart devices like iPad and smartphones, Astro will deliver contents to their consumers anywhere their consumers find it convenient to consume. Just like The Stars ePaper.

Then from the competitors viewpoint, just imagine Malay Mail relaunched as an ePaper. Massive savings on newsprint and delivery costs. Does that mean that this is the beginning of the end of free physical newspaper' Absolutely intriguing. Technological advances have disrupted businesses all over the world. And HBS is actually reviewing amongst themselves whether e-learning will disrupt their current successful executive education model' Will your business be disrupted by new technologies' If it is, be afraid. Be very afraid.

High margin 

I have always emphasised that entrepreneur wannabes should go into high margin business. Which means avoid businesses that is being commoditised and having the ability to differentiate your products or services from your competition. The in word in business school today is disruption. Disrupt others before they disrupt you. Disrupt yourself to stay ahead. Stay ahead of technology disruption. Be the disruptor not the disruptee. There are no such words. I just disrupted the dictionary.

So is the HBS executive education programme as good as they claimed' Does it justify the high positioning and high cost charged' Honestly, I have no idea. They have kept us so busy from day one to stop us from thinking about it. And they have piled a tonne of case studies and notes onto us. Plus many free books written by the professors. So much so that this bunch of senior executives with an average age of 47 years face information fatigue, CPU overload and degrading eyesights.

Case studies still piling in until the last day. John Kotter still to speak next week. But spirits are high as we look forward to the close of the programme. This programme has been a major disruption to my life. Miss my country, my sunshine, my food, my friends and colleagues. And most of all my family.

Have a happy weekend.

ON YOUR OWN By TAN THIAM HOCK

The writer is an entrepreneur who hopes to share his experience and insights with readers who want to take that giant leap into business but are not sure if they should. Email him at thtan@alliancecosmetics.com 

Learning From The Masters of Management

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Dan Schawbel, Contributor

Adrian Wooldridge

I recently spoke with Adrian Wooldridge, who is the author of Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World – for Better and for Worse. Wooldridge is the management editor and “Schumpeter” columnist of The Economist. He was educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and All Souls College, Oxford, where he held a Prize Fellowship. He was formerly The Economist’s Washington bureau chief and “Lexington” columnist. In this interview, he talks about how the field of management has changed over the past decade, the difference between management and leadership, and more.

How has the field of management changed in the past decade?

Management has been revolutionised by two great changes over the past decade. The first is the rise of the internet. A decade ago the internet was still a fancy reference tool and Google was still a start up. Today the internet is reorganising the world. The internet is not only spawning an entire ecosystem of new businesses. It is reshaping the way that even the most conservative companies organise their business.

The second is the rise of emerging markets. A decade ago we still referred (often pityingly) to the underdeveloped world. Today we regard the emerging world as a hotbed of growth and innovation. Investment houses are pouring money into the BRICs even as they despair about stagnating Europe. Multinationals are ‘offshoring’ research and development as well as manufacturing to India and Brazil.

Are all managers leaders? What’s the difference between management and leadership?

No: not all managers are leaders (and not all leaders are managers: some great leaders such as Winston Churchill have been hopeless everyday managers).

The great distinction between the two lies in the choice of direction: leadership is about choosing where to go while management is about choosing how to get there. Jack Welch was a great business leader because he changed General Electric’s strategic direction with his emphasis on being number one or number two in a business or getting out. A secondary distinction lies in inspiration: the best leaders not only set a direction but inspire their followers to strain every sinew in reaching their new destination. There is nothing second-rate about management: great leaders mean nothing without the nuts-and-bolts men and women who put their visions into practice and make sure that the trains run on time. Incremental changes can sometimes add up to big changes. But given the uncertainty of the current business world—the sudden gusts of change that blow from unexpected directions—leadership is more important now than it was say fifty years ago when ‘organisation man’ ruled the roost.



Can you name a few management gurus that you’ve been observing and explain how they have helped make change?

These astonishing changes of the past decade—the world remade by the internet and turned upside down by emerging markets—have changed the pecking order among business thinkers. You are probably more likely to find a mind-changing article in Wired than in the Harvard Business Review or from an Indian than from an American-first mid-westerner.

The business gurus that I pay most attention to come in two guises: geeks or third-world firstists. Christopher Anderson made waves with his book on The Long Tale (which argued that the world of niches is replacing the world of mass markets). The book has had a huge influence not only with high-tech companies but with other organisations (retailers for example) that are seeing their markets redefined by the internet.

I suspect that his work-in-progress on 3-D printing will also have a big influence (though there is a lot of work in this area). V.G. Govindirajan of Tuck Business Shool has produced exemplary work on ‘frugal innovation’ (the idea that the most interesting form of innovation in the emerging world is about radically reducing costs rather than adding more bells and whistles. This has had a huge impact on General Electric which is producing a new generation of ‘frugal’ medical products. John Hagel and John Seely Brown have produced equally fasinating work on how these ‘frugal products’ will send a wave of disruption through rich countries, as traditional producers are forced to cut costs dramatically or see their markets eaten up by emerging-market giants.

What will the new management gurus of the future look like?

The management gurus of the future will look more like the class of 2010 at CEIBS or the Indian Business School than the class of 2010 at Harvard Business School or Wharton. They will also look more like the class of 2010 at the Stanford School of Engineering than the class of 2010 at the Stanford Business School: white faces will give way to ‘faces of colour’ and classic business school types will give way to engineers and other sorts of geeks.

Masters of Management

For the past century business thinking has been dominated by the United States. The bulk of the business cases have been about American companies. The bulk of the tools and techniques have been dreampt up by American managers. The driving assumption has been that if you don’t measure up to American standards—about how you organise your company or measure your performance—you are doing something wrong. That model was shaken by the rise of Japan but reasserted itself in the 1990s. It is now being shaken up even more thoroughly by the rise of a huge variety of emerging world companies. The business gurus of the future will come from emerging world—not just from India (which has cornered the market for the moment) but also from China, Indonesia, Turkey and Nigeria.

For the past century technology gurus have played second fiddle to strategy gurus (or even marketing gurus). Peter Drucker was less interested in technology than in the sociology of organisations. Tom Peters made little use of his training as an engineer in his voluminous writing. Technology is now at the heart of business thinking rather than an optional add on. Technology gurus are rewiring our thinking about organisations. And gurus from other disciplines face a stark choice: think deeply about what is happening in the world of the internet or face irrelevance.

Dan Schawbel, recognized as a “personal branding guru” by The New York Times, is the Managing Partner of Millennial Branding, LLC, a full-service personal branding agency. Dan is the author of Me 2.0: 4 Steps to Building Your Future, the founder of the Personal Branding Blog, and publisher of Personal Branding Magazine. He has worked with companies such as Google, Time Warner, Symantec, IBM, EMC, and CitiGroup.

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We need to talk about capitalism, say CEOs

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Simon Mann

Professors from the Harvard Businees School, above, have identified ten major threats to capitalism. Photo: Greg Newington

Three professors from the world's pre-eminent business school have co-written a study that at first blush looks to fall more into the genre of horror story than business text.

But in identifying 10 powerful forces that threaten the existence of the capitalist system - the most successful engine of economic growth the world has known - the dons of the Harvard Business School appear to have drawn a line connecting the fears of the boardroom and those of the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Income disparity, resource depletion and potentially cataclysmic climate change were recognised by CEOs in a series of conversations conducted by Harvard as among the potential ''disruptors'' of global prosperity. The financial meltdown of 2008 and the Occupy movement are clear manifestations of those fears.



''And we would expect more [of the same],'' says co-author Joseph Bower. ''Because people really feel outraged.''

Professor Bower and his colleagues note in their study the broad concerns of the 46 business thinkers brought together in forums on three continents, but by far the most widely held was ''the tendency of capitalism, as it currently functions, to produce extreme disparities of income and wealth''.

Said one unidentified Asian business leader: ''Herein lies a major challenge, because the world has become very much more prosperous as a result of market capitalism. The rich have become richer. The poor in most cases have become richer. But the gap between the rich and the poor has grown wider … There is the growing sense of being left out, even as people are getting better off.''

One European executive said: ''What was the good of capitalism? Was it the fact that we were building a very large, very well off - not wealthy but well off - middle class? We are not doing this any more.''

The Harvard project coincided with the Business School's centenary. What better way to celebrate it than to examine the state of the system that had nurtured its own rise to prominence? By then, it had conferred nearly 56,000 MBAs on men and women, many of whom went on to head prominent companies in the US and around the world.

The school brought together chief executives and business leaders in 2007 and early 2008 for its series of discussions. They included Australia's David Murray, the former Commonwealth Bank boss who is now chairman of the Future Fund.

Using its famous case-method approach to inquiry, it took as a starting point the then most recent World Bank growth projections and batted around the issues. Capitalism at Risk: Rethinking the role of business, just published, is the result.

Joining in the talks were executives such as Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric, John Elkann of Fiat and Bertrand Collomb of Lafarge.

That capitalism has delivered for billions is not at issue: in the last decades of the 20th century, 97 per cent of countries enjoyed increased wealth, according to the World Bank. But the executives cited as potential threats the powerful forces within financial markets, environmental degradation and political populism, terrorism and war, migration and pandemics.

''History tells us that when an awful lot of people are disenfranchised, they have no incentive to play by the rules, and given today's communications availability, weaponry … that's an issue we have to really think about,'' one said.

Unsurprisingly, they back business, not government, to ameliorate strains on the system through innovation and activism. ''Good government is crucial, to be sure,'' write the Harvard professors. ''But government … needs the support and engagement of business to function effectively.''

In the US, the argument for higher taxes on the wealthy has coalesced around billionaire investor Warren Buffett, who has become a poster boy for the Obama's administration's campaign to raise revenues, resisted by Republicans.

''Finding a way to mobilise the entire relevant business community - and others - to help support the needed taxes simply makes sense,'' the Harvard dons conclude.

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