The Big Score by Michael S. Malone

Author:Michael S. Malone [Malone, Michael S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stripe Press
Published: 2021-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Sporck went home, packed up his young family, and headed West. A month later he was standing in the lobby of Fairchild Semiconductor in Mountain View. He was stunned to find that no one had heard of him, and no one had expected his arrival. “Which was kind of frightening since I had cut all my bridges. It took me some time to find one of those two guys who had offered me the job. As it turned out, they had hired two people for the same position.”

So young Charlie Sporck, fresh to Silicon Valley, found himself sharing an office with another man holding the same job, both of them directing a sole general foreman between them. “It was typical of that period because the company—the whole area for that matter—was growing like crazy. There was very little maturity, very little control.”

But in a short time life at the company settled down to the semi-controlled chaos that was Fairchild in the early sixties. The other production manager soon disappeared, and Sporck, alone among all these young men in having hard experience in getting stuff built, began to rise to the top. It wasn’t easy. The wild life of Fairchild played hell on personal lives, but Sporck was nearly unique in staying married, in time becoming the father of three sons.

After only a year and a half, Sporck was made division operations manager. And just three years after that, when Noyce moved upstairs to run all of Fairchild, Sporck was made head man (division general manager) of Fairchild Semiconductor—a job equivalent to company president.

During these years Fairchild thrived, much of it due to Sporck’s extraordinary manufacturing skill. But, bumped up to the general manager’s job, Sporck found himself bogged down with the same problems Noyce had faced—notably the corporate bureaucracy and the continuing loss of talent.

Throughout Sporck’s tenure as general manager, he found himself trying to convince employees not to leave but having no carrot, like stocks, to wave before them. By 1966, Sporck was infected by the same bug, and two years later he, too, left Fairchild to try his hand at saving National Semiconductor.

Why National? Because it was going belly-up—“which is obviously the only kind of company you can make a deal with.” How did he find it? “I just went down the list of semiconductor companies. There weren’t many of them.”

Stock options or not, few executives have ever left the reins of one of America’s most successful companies to take over a tiny wreck of a firm sliding into bankruptcy and unsure where the next payroll would come from. But Sporck had no doubts: “It never occurred to me that we would fail. I look at the situation quite straightforwardly. We had a lot of harrowing experiences for the next few months, but I never had any doubt.”

Now, after 18 years of struggling, National Semiconductor has become one of the largest companies in electronics, 10 times as large as the Fairchild Sporck left in 1968. Yet the way seems no easier.

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