STRATEGIC ACTIONS

Once a strategy has been selected, leaders must figure out what actions have to be taken to successfully implement it, and they must take all of them. Often that means walking away from old systems and setting up entirely new ones. At Ameritech, the decision to enter new fields meant actually lobbying to give away the company’s monopoly on local phone service in order to get permission to enter new fields. As a result, Weiss and Notebaert found that they had to address every aspect of the business from redefining winning (they expressly mentioned the importance of rewarding shareholders for the first time) to reorganizing the company into business units, to redefining leadership through personnel changes and leadership development. Fundamentally, they saw that they had to rebuild the company from the ground up. At Intel, Grove and his colleagues faced a similarly daunting challenge. Once Grove had made up his mind to leave the memory chip business, he had to figure out how. What impact would this have on customers, for example? Did the company need a full product line to offer computer manufacturers? Was the technology in memories so central to Intel’s other products that it had to stay a part of the company? To answer these questions, Grove conducted discussions with Intel employees and others over lunches and at technical conferences, staff meetings, and product planning sessions. Even despite his firm conviction that the decision he and Moore had made was correct, when Intel managers asked, “Are we getting out of the memory business?” Grove still struggled with actually saying, “Yes.” He, as much as anyone, had built Intel and identified the company with its success in the memory business. It was hard for him to abandon it. He subsequently found himself taking half-steps to get out of the memory business. He would at one moment decide to do it, but then approve the R&D budget for new memory chip designs. Finally Grove started to turn the corner. He was ready to make the strategic moves necessary to implement the new plan. In what was for Grove the crossing of the Rubicon, he told the sales force to notify customers that Intel would be getting out of the memory business.