him as a spy in their Toshiba-only meetings. What an awkward situation.
As the team grew, the management structure grew, too. Eventually, there were six second-line managers and one project manager working under Jim Kahle and Chekib Akrout in the Design Center. Technology and engineering as a whole were still overwhelmingly male-dominated fields, so it was somewhat surprising when the Design Center ended up filling five of these top leadership positions with women. The STI project was not a proving ground for gender equality, nor was it a traditional engineering team where men ruled the roost. It was simply proof positive that IBM’s long-held policy of hiring, developing, and promoting women engineers was effective. It functioned exactly as intended by providing IBM with a strong, capable, and diverse workforce. The STI project’s diversity is a tribute to Chekib Akrout, who selected leaders based on capabilities, not gender or race. At STI, the two or three dozen female engineers on the team gained a real vision for their own advancement potential by looking at the good role models these women in leadership positions provided. This coalition of powerful women created a climate of cooperation in the workplace, making it a place where teamwork ruled.
Second-line managers were responsible for the technical goals, schedules, and performance for their respective teams, as well as all the personnel issues. Their teams came in sizes ranging from 30 to 240 people. Linda Van Grinsven was the first woman recruited for one of the coveted second-line management positions. She and her husband, Gene, both engineers, had been with IBM for nearly twenty years, mostly at the Rochester, Minnesota site. They relocated to Austin for a two-year temporary assignment, and Linda led the group responsible for the design of the Synergistic core, which you’ll read more about later. This core, slated to be used multiple times on the chip, was the brainchild of Ken Kutaragi and Jim Kahle. The forty-five people on Linda’s team were almost all located in Austin, but many of them were Japanese employees of Sony or Toshiba. Consequently, she tackled the language barrier early on and was instrumental in forming many of the practices that helped the Design Center function effectively in a multicultural environment. With a couple of hothead technical leads under her, Linda had her hands full keeping the peace in her team.
My co-author, Mickie Phipps, a relative newcomer to IBM, came in as a first-line manager in 1999 from Eaton Corporation. Prior to that, during her 20 years in active duty and reserve service with the United States Air Force, Mickie’s resume spanned such jobs as aircraft mechanic, intelligence officer, and research and development engineer for air-to-air missiles. She joined the STI Design Center in September 2001 as Chekib Akrout’s technical assistant. This was a period of uncertainty for her as our country recalled military reservists in great numbers to fight the war on terror. She had been expecting to retire from the Air Force that year, but the attack on the Twin Towers in New York City changed everything. Twice, Mickie received orders to report for active duty with the Air Force, and both times those orders were cancelled at the last minute. Her position with Akrout was meant to be a gap-filler while she waited for her date to report. Months later, the Air Force released Mickie from service and in the summer of 2002, Akrout promoted her to second-line manager for the PowerPC team. I knew her well from her work with Akrout and was very pleased that we were now partners. Our team, located at seven different IBM sites in time zones that stretched from Germany to California, eventually grew to 240 people. Technical complexity, size of the team, geography, and language and cultural differences presented rocky challenges that we worked through together
Kathy Papermaster led the Convergence team for a short time in late 2001 and early 2002. Her team was responsible for functions that were more global in nature or were more focused at the chip level, like design tools which had to be common throughout the team, chip verification, and chip integration. Kathy definitely had her heart set on becoming an IBM executive and soon left the Design Center to take a position as an executive assistant to a vice president, Michel Mayer. To replace her, Chekib Akrout brought out the big guns and lured former IBMer Dac Pham away from a very high-level position at Intel. Dac was high-energy, enthusiastic, and optimistic.
After more than fifteen years of service with IBM, Pam Spann had resigned (along with many others) following the infamous retirement plan debacle in 1999. In one fell swoop, IBM had adjusted their benefit plan to fit a younger, more mobile workforce, drastically altering the retirement plans for a significant number of long-term, dedicated employees. IBM’s new plan no longer offered benefits that provided retired workers with a monthly check, and instead offered a cash-balance plan that would pay employees a lump sum when they left the company. One result of this change was that many of those long-term employees no longer felt obliged to hang in there for that payout during their golden years; they could take their money (what little was offered) and run. And many did. It was, after all, a boom time in the high-tech industry. However, Pam’s gamble on one of the dot-com startup companies wasn’t altogether a pleasant experience, and she quickly accepted when STI called her home to IBM. In late 2001, Chekib Akrout rehired Pam to manage the Design Center’s business operations, including all the finances, staffing, and personnel issues. Even during the darkest of days in the Design Center, Pam would always say she was glad she had come back. She tried to encourage the team and to help them work through any problems they encountered. She knew from experience that the grass is not always greener on the other side.
Almost from day one, Keryn Mills was the project manager, responsible for the entire schedule for the design, test, and manufacture of the chips. Keryn had been with IBM for more than thirty-five years and was a formidable force, running “her” projects with an iron fist. She was like a dog on a bone. Nothing could shake her loose from something she believed in, even if it was at the expense of the morale of the team. She worked an unbelievable number of hours, often going home only for a few short hours of sleep. She was famous for her successful projects, and many executives and managers respected and trusted her, and listened to her opinions. The trick was to know when to turn her loose and when to rein her in. Most of the technical team dreaded being in her spotlight, and managers tried to shield them from her wrath. It wasn’t always easy to stay on her good side.
Over time, the team of engineers I shared with Mickie, who worked on the PowerPC core, continued to grow, expanding into a huge team justified only by the fact that we were starting our design from scratch instead of doing a derivative design based on an existing IBM microprocessor. At our home base in Austin, there were approximately twenty partners from Sony, eighty from Toshiba, and more than a hundred from IBM. The remaining IBMers were scattered across seven sites worldwide, including Raleigh, North Carolina; Rochester, Minnesota; Yorktown, New York; Endicott, New York; Boebligen, Germany; San Jose, California; and Burlington, Vermont.
CHAPTER 3
Know Your Competition
It is competition that drives us to higher levels of excellence and, therefore, to more opportunity. An accurate assessment of our competition’s capabilities is what enables us to refine the boundaries of our bold vision. We must make sure we shoot high enough.
JIM KAHLE, CHEKIB AKROUT, AND I relaxed on Kahle’s deck. A spectacular peach and purple sunset clung to the sky over the Texas Hill Country beyond Lake Austin. Just for a moment, the conversation lulled, got whisper quiet. Hummingbirds darted in and out of colorful flower beds, ruby throats glistening in the last of the sunlight. Bees buzzed in the trumpet vine. Heavy summer air and the sweet smell of gardenias wafted over us. I tipped back in my chair, propped my feet on the deck’s sun-weathered railing, and watched as a lone water-skier carved out one rooster tail after another on the placid lake below. Contentment flowed over me like warm honey…or maybe it was the Scotch. Very old, very good, single malt. Kahle’s favorite.
It was late summer in 2001 and after six months of startup work, things were going so well at the Design Center—the team was finally approaching critical mass, and a concept of the chip was coming together—that we decided to have our own little private celebration. “To success,” I toasted. We clinked glasses and smiled like silly old fools.
Darkness crept across the sky, pushing the
