Wall Street Journal about Mike Malone's new book

I am not generally a fan of the Wall Street Journal's point of view--they all too often extol companies who lay off people and outsource functions in the name of greater shareholder value while demeaning the employees and their communities.  They lobby for more tax credits for already protected industries, for repatriating obscene hidden off shore profits, they decry the Silicon Valley creativity and innovation as fads--you get the picture.

And once in a while, they zing through with a trenchant arrow, to the heart.

Which the editor, Marcus Brauchli, did to our local Silicon Valley historian, Mike Malone, last week about his new, lively and colorful book about the three leaders of Intel--Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Andy Grove.  Mike has written twenty books by now, all fast-paced page-turners about the great companies and even better stories in this improbable Silicon Valley.  He is, by most counts, credible.

Yes, Mike is given to hyperbole; yes, he is untroubled by facts on occasion; okay, a little bombastic.  The title is grand: The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove built the world's most important company.  As Brauchli observed: "Malone is a technology enthusiast; indeed, his other book titles seem to leave little space for the importance he ascribes to Intel: “Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World’s Greatest Company” and “Infinite Loop: How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane.” "

The piece I was not expecting, though, was Brauchli's conclusion, which is exactly our theme of Intrapreneuring Innovation:  "But most problematic for both Malone and Intel is the abbreviated denouement to this book: When Krzanich became chief executive in 2013, after 31 years at the company, Intel had less than 1 percent of the mobile market, the new business segment dominated by companies like Apple and Samsung.

That raises perhaps the most profound unanswered question of the book and of Silicon Valley’s past half-century: How is it that even the most agile and powerful companies falter and lose the cadence of innovation that made them great? Malone doesn’t offer an answer. What he has produced is popular history, the tale of an epoch-defining industrial romp and the three men who led it."

That is the question we've been posing now for some time.  That is what has happened all over America, aided and abetted I might point out, by the vaunted Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Buisiness School for fifty years now.  Silicon Valley companies were not raised on the "Core Competence" notions of the MBA schools or the accounting-driven nostrums of Wall Street.  They however, have handed over the reins to folk adept at those skills, just as surely killing the creative juices as Steve Jobs once said.  So kudos for WSJ for noticing!