NEWS ANALYSIS: With its financially focused leadership board and CEO, Intel will be focused on fixing damage to the company; strategy will either be something the board will avoid or do badly, because CFOs aren’t known to be product or market visionaries.
Intel has named Bob Swan, its interim chief executive officer, as permanent CEO, and the market isn’t happy. This effectively gives Intel three chief financial officers: Chairman Andy Bryant, who is an ex-Intel CFO; Swan, who was the previous CFO; and the new actual CFO.
You could add that the firm has several other CFO types on the board, making leadership excessively control-focused. This is like taking a car that is crashing a lot and focusing on putting in redundant brakes: On the positive side, you’ll stop the crashing; on the negative side, it may not make it off the starting line.
Now, having said that, this may actually be what Intel needs right now, because the former CEO, Brian Krzanich, pretty much trashed the firm, and it needs to be reformed into something that someone can manage. A CFO, or a team of them, isn’t a bad choice if you want to restructure a company that was badly damaged. But they’ll be focused on fixing the damage; strategy will either be something they’ll avoid like the plague or do really badly, because CFOs aren’t known to be product or market visionaries. If they were, they’d never have wanted to be CFOs.
Intel’s Biggest Issue Remains Its Board
There were several serious problems when it came to select a new CEO. First is the makeup of Intel’s board, which is far from technical and only has one qualified electrical engineer on it (and she is an academic and likely at least partially selected for diversity). Ideally, Intel’s board should be heavy in microprocessor engineers, telecom engineers and/or automotive engineers with a focus on the automotive electronics.
