Thinkers 50 Management: Cutting Edge Thinking to Engage and Motivate Your Employees for Success by Stuart Crainer & Des Dearlove

Author:Stuart Crainer & Des Dearlove [Crainer, Stuart]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Published: 2013-10-31T14:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

7

Managing Talent

William Shockley was a British-born research scientist who worked at the Bell Laboratories during the postwar period developing the transistor. In 1947 Shockley was recognized as the coinventor of the transistor, and in 1956 he was awarded a Nobel Prize for his efforts. In 1955, he left the Bell Labs to found his own company, Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, in Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, California. His academic reputation attracted some of the finest minds in electronics to his company. Among them were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore of Moore’s law fame, who went on to cofound Intel; Julius Blank; Victor Grinich; Eugene Kleiner; Jean Hoerni; Jay Last; and Sheldon Roberts.

Unfortunately, Shockley’s management skills fell far short of his academic prowess. To him people were dispensable. When he was asked whether his wife liked California, he replied: “She didn’t like it, so I had to get a new wife.” This anecdote seems to sum up his approach to human resources.

Not surprisingly, staff morale at Shockley’s lab soon deteriorated. Eventually, Eugene Kleiner wrote a letter to a friend of his father who worked at an investment bank. The gist of the letter was that there was a group of seven scientists at Shockley Semiconductors who wanted to move en masse to another company.

Arthur Rock, a Harvard MBA at the investment bank, read the letter. Rock suggested that the seven should leave to start their own company. Rock secured funding from the inventor and entrepreneur Sherman Fairchild. Adding Bob Noyce to their number, the group started Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957.

Fairchild Semiconductor went on to revolutionize the world of computing through its work on the silicon transistor. As important, it threw off a slew of talented individuals who went on to start up some of the best-known companies in Silicon Valley.

Intel (Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore), Advanced Micro Devices (Jerry Sanders), and National Semiconductor (Charlie Sporck) were all spin-offs from Fairchild.

The defection of the so-called traitorous eight also played a major role in spawning the professional venture capital industry as a by-product. Arthur Rock and Eugene Kleiner became two of Silicon Valley’s most respected VCs. Shockley’s misguided approach to human resources inadvertently laid the cornerstone of Silicon Valley.

Talent-spotting companies have always fought with one another to attract the most able executives. At the end of the 1990s McKinsey & Company suggested that this perennial issue was set to become much more important. A McKinsey consultant, Steven Hankin, coined the phrase the war for talent to describe what it anticipated happening and what largely did happen.

McKinsey argued that there wouldn’t be enough senior management talent to go around and that companies would have to find new and better ways to attract and retain high-caliber managers.

The 1997 research, based on a study of 77 large U.S. companies and carried out by five McKinsey consultants across North America, indicated that the battle for talent was already fierce. “Many American companies are already suffering a shortage of executive talent,” said the report’s authors. “Three-quarters of corporate officers

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