PERSPECTIVE ON MANAGEMENT : Inside Intel: a Perception Problem : Why did it take so long for a major corporation to do what should have been done from the very beginning?

A letter to Andrew Grove, chief executive officer of Intel Corp.

Dear Mr. Grove:

I am writing to thank you for all the needed publicity you’ve given to crisis management. Through the misguided efforts of CEOs such as yourself, corporate America may finally wake up and “get it.” For this reason, let me review the major lessons of Intel’s crisis. It’s always the same pattern:

* Start out denying that it’s a crisis or downplay its seriousness.

* Continue denying it even when major news organizations do investigations that substantiate nearly all the allegations.

* Put the burden on your customers to prove why they need replacement chips; i.e., make it as hard on them as possible.

* Alienate the public even further by statements like, “No one was injured; it’s not like we’re in the pharmaceutical business where lives are at stake.” The fact is you are in the pharmaceutical business. Your chips are involved in critical calculations that affect lives.

* Give the public meaningless numbers as to the probabilities of being affected. This assumes that everyone is a scientist or a statistician; numbers do not treat people as humans and therefore alienate them even further.

* Do what you should have done from the very beginning only when you are forced to; i.e., acknowledge the crisis and replace all chips, no questions asked.

The saddest and most ironic part of Intel’s crisis is that the very organizations that are responsible for propelling us into the systems age don’t understand it.

Systems are composed of people and technology, not technology alone. People are not machines. Engineering organizations such as yours are the last to understand this. From your standpoint, people may be behaving irrationally, but from their perspective they are not. Guess which one counts.

There are no secrets anymore. The constant 24-hour, 365-day news world that you’ve helped to create is voracious. It is waiting for you and anyone else to stumble.

Everything is connected to everything else in strange, weird and even unpredictable ways. The issue is no longer whether you’ll have another crisis. The only issue is when it will happen, how, why, and how big it will be--and, most important of all, whether you will be the victim or the villain.

You will be audited. Either you learn from this crisis and better prepare yourself, or the media will do a public audit on why you were not better prepared for your next crisis.

Why did it take so long for you and your organization to learn some of these lessons? Indeed, have you really learned any of them?