Chewing on the "Intel story"

The last post noted the acidic review about Mike Malone's topic--Intel, the most important company of our age: 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.

We continue to be astonished that others are astonished to hear just how badly the large American companies have been performing for the past twenty-five years.  From Boeing to GE, Nike to Cisco, IBM to Proctor and Gamble, the tale is unremittingly dismal.  They all grew magnificently, then flattened.  As is STOPPED growing altogether.  Intel, HP, Oracle, Merck, Disney... the list is long. This leaves out Polaroid, Kodak, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, Digital Equipment, seventy major retailers (e.g. Circuit City, I Magnin, A.O. Swartz) and a host of other forgotten 'leaders' who totally derailed.  It omits Xerox, Westinghouse, Raytheon, Lockheed, and other 'worthies' who pirouetted into smaller, leaner slivers of their former selves.  It doesn't count the Mergers and Acquisitions fervor, the consolidations, the reverse splits, and the other machinations so common in this time.

I recently asked a group of a hundred senior Hewlett-Packard managers where their company stood on the corporate growth cycle (c.f. the chart shown here).  A handful voted for the first arrow (still growing), the vast majority for the middle, but twelve for "starting to keel over".  I couldn't help but ask: "Why are you still there?"

When President Reagan formed the Presidential Commission on Competitiveness in 1986, the purpose was to "promote American business competitiveness in order to preserve American jobs."
The five leaders of the past decade (2001-2010) were respectively the CEO or Board Chair of Merck, Xerox, Motorola, Bell South, and DuPont, each selected when their company was (still) considered the paragon of leadership in their field.  Here's the track record:

Thank gawd we have these stalwart leaders helping fashion American business policies to save the American worker.  LOSING 71% of their own workers--what if we had duds on the commission?  This is not just a singular case--this is endemic, and maddening, and guess what--IT IS TOTALLY UNREPORTED, UNCHALLENGED, and UNBELIEVABLY GRIEVOUS.  The American middle class has been gutted by such policies, somewhat and maybe significantly damaging the American dream.  Why, you might ask, is this so ignored?  

There are reasons, and there are answers.  But if our leaders, pundits, analysts, and policy makers don't agree that there is a problem, it is hard to address it.  And, so far, they don't agree.

Are you:

1. shocked, surprised, amazed--as in 'had no idea it was this bad'?

2. in agreement, but surprised by the extent claimed above

3. in agreement, and wondering why this is not obvious to 'everyone'

4. discouraged, enraged that this is not a topic of high concern, and being addressed