working as a secretary in a financial software company. But her marriage had begun to crumble, and she had seriously considered going back to England to pick up her old life in the Worcestershire countryside. While she was thinking about it, though, McFarland had been told by a friend that Intel was a company that was going places – and she had sent in a letter of application.
Waiting in the lobby, Sue McFarland was met by a man with short, frizzy brown hair and very thick glasses, striding in from a corridor at high speed. He was wearing polyester trousers, a white short-sleeved shirt with an array of coloured pens in the pocket, and a broad, rather loud tie. ‘I am Andy Grove,’ he announced. ‘Please come through to my office.’
The office was austere, and lit by a single small window. There was barely room for the two of them; perhaps that was why Ann Bowers hadn’t followed them in. Covering the walls were dozens of charts, each filled in meticulously by hand using coloured ink, with incomprehensible acronyms on the axes. Switch on your professional smile, Sue. Look confident. Choose an opening line.
‘What do the graphs represent?’ she asked pleasantly.
‘Why do you want to know?’ Grove snapped back. Or rather: Vy-do-you-vant-to-know? His English was still strongly accented with Hungarian.
‘I’m curious,’ she continued, refusing to be thrown off her guard. ‘I know that you are in charge of operations, so I’m sure you must have industrial processes to keep an eye on. I’m interested to know what kind of things you are tracking.’
Grove explained, as if he expected her not to know already, that Intel Corporation was in the business of making semiconductors. ‘Semiconductors are materials that neither prevent the passage of electrical currents nor allow them to conduct as easily as through a copper wire, for instance …’ he continued.
Sue McFarland sat back in her chair, trying to concentrate on the mini-lecture that her interviewer had begun.
‘… This gives them certain behavioural characteristics that make them very useful in designing electrical circuits. But it also means they are sensitive to small changes in the manufacturing environment. Our business depends on being able to produce semiconductor devices in large volumes at high quality. Small changes in the production processes we use and the materials present when we build them can have dramatic effects on the percentage of the production run that is usable when we have finished. Higher yields mean that we have more products to sell from each production run, which means that our costs are lower. This in turn means that our profits are higher.’
‘I see,’ she replied.
‘But we are here to talk first about you. Tell me a little about your experience.’
It was when Sue McFarland explained that she was a qualified shorthand writer that Grove interrupted her. ‘Shorthand?’ he asked. ‘Not speedwriting? The difference is important, and speedwriting does not please me.’
‘Yes, I can write shorthand.’
‘Would you mind, then, if I were to check your skills by dictating a memo to you, having you take it down in shorthand, and asking you to type it?’
It was clear that the question was merely rhetorical. The candidate took a notebook and a pencil from her bag, replaced the bag at the side of her chair, and waited.
Oblivious to the difficulty caused by his Hungarian accent, Grove began to dictate a quick-fire memo to a number of members of his staff, dealing with a number of problems that had come up with a specific named manufacturing process. Sue McFarland had little trouble keeping up, but she felt she was translating the words of the memo into the dots and squiggles of shorthand like an automaton, understanding nothing of what she was writing. Why are you doing this? she thought. Why are you wasting your time and his? It was almost an interruption when Grove said, ‘That’s it’.
He got up from behind the desk, led her outside into the corridor, and showed her an electric typewriter on a small table. She wheeled the chair out from below, sat down, and rolled a fresh sheet of white paper into the machine. Taking a deep breath, she looked at her notes and prepared to begin. Then something made her glance over her shoulder.
Grove was still there, watching her – and he clearly had no intention of going away.
As she typed, the words on the page blurred in and out of focus. People clattered past on the linoleum of the narrow corridor. All the time, Grove stood behind her, watching her as the memo appeared line by line. Ninety per cent of it was right. Considering the circumstances, she said to herself, you’re not doing badly at all.
By the time the memo was finished Sue McFarland had regained her self-possession. She pulled the paper smoothly out of the typewriter, and swung around in her chair as she handed it to her interviewer. She gave him her coolest look. ‘Feel free to fill in the blanks,’ she said.
It was too much to expect that he would merely glance at the paper. Back in the office, Grove sat down at his desk, and studied the memo intently for three, maybe even four minutes. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is not entirely correct, but you have made a good attempt. I will be happy to offer you the job.’
Sue McFarland felt the quiet thump of the heart that comes with a sudden piece of exciting news. She felt herself able to relax for the first time that morning. But it was not in the nature of a well-trained Englishwoman to jump up and perform a victory dance. Instead, she simply smiled. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.
‘Ann Bowers will make the necessary arrangements for your salary and your entry pass to get into the building. When can you start?’ ‘I’ll have to think a little about that, Dr Grove.’
‘Call me Andy. We use first names in this company.’
A week into the job, Sue McFarland received a shock as she hung up her coat. Her new boss called her into his office, and sat her down in front of him. ‘You’ve been late three times,’ he said.
Sue McFarland looked at her watch. It was shortly after 8.10. The company’s official starting-time was eight o’clock, just like her last job. In her old company, she had always come in some time between 8.15 and 8.30, and nobody had complained.
‘Work at Intel starts at eight o’clock,’ said Grove. ‘I expect everyone in the company to be here at that time, ready to do business.’
McFarland gulped.
‘How can I expect the rest of the staff to do this if my own secretary comes in late?’
She left the room shaking.
OK, she said to herself after she had pulled herself together. Do we want to work under this pressure, or do we want to go and look for something else?
Sue McFarland was nothing if not a fighter. This might be her first introduction to Grove’s Hungarian work ethic, but she resolved there and then to treat it as a character-building experience.
Over the succeeding weeks Grove began to reveal further glimpses into his character. The office, dark and small as it may have been, was scrupulously tidy. The filing system that Grove had managed himself until then, but now wanted McFarland to take over for him, was a model of simplicity: all paperwork, except certain regular production reports, was filed immediately under the name of the sender. Incoming mail and memoranda were to be sorted by her and put into three piles: one for ‘action required’, one for ‘important information’, and one for ‘background
