Killer Results Without Killing Yourself

Still, if the work was frustrating, Marsing's career remained meteoric. On July 1, 1990 he returned to running a fab, this time Intel's seven-year-old Fab 9-1 (now part of Fab 9) in Rio Rancho, a suburb of Albuquerque.

He was now halfway through the worst year of his life. And it was about to get worse. Fab 9-1 was in turmoil. Marsing had been parachuted in to save the plant, and surveying the scene, he saw it had all the earmarks of a suicide mission. The new Intel microprocessor, the 80486, the company's hope for the future, depended on this plant more than on any other -- and Fab 9-1 couldn't get the chips out the door. Yield rates were disastrous: a failure in the plant's diffusion furnaces, a critical piece of equipment in the processing of silicon wafers, was turning half of the plant's chip production into worthless scrap each day. And it was growing steadily worse. Two weeks after Marsing arrived, the plant had wasted $50 million worth of chips.

Intel headquarters demanded an immediate end to the red ink; employees at the plant confronted Marsing with their frustration and fear. Caught in between, Marsing found himself crushed under pressure like he'd never known. Being diabetic didn't help. He'd drag himself home late at night barely able to sleep from worry. Even
his morning exercise, which had always renewed him in the past,
couldn't calm him. In fact, all Marsing was getting for his morning efforts was a stiff neck.

That was Monday. On Tuesday the stiff neck came back again. By Wednesday his neck hurt even when he walked fast between buildings. But the urgency of putting the fab back on its feet obscured a little physical discomfort.

Then at 5:26 a.m. on August 11, 1990, 36-year-old Dave Marsing found himself on a hospital gurney suffering a heart attack. Coronaries at that age are usually fatal, but Marsing was lucky. He had made it to the hospital in time. Within hours he was out of bypass surgery and on his way to recovery.

The Big Lie

in the weeks of recuperation that followed, Marsing had time to think. The heart attack had not permanently damaged his heart, but Marsing knew he could no longer live as he had.

He began to take stock. The first and most obvious question was whether he should continue working for Intel. After all, this was a company that prided itself on demanding superhuman contributions from its employees. Back in 1981, during a severe industry recession, Intel had become famous (and notorious) for instituting the "125% Solution," a six-month program in which employees were asked to work an extra two hours each day without pay -- "voluntarily."

As Marsing thought about the people with whom he worked, he realized that he wasn't alone: "It hit me that most of the people around me were also exhibiting stress-related or stress-enhanced problems, either physically or emotionally." They were living a kind of lie, caught between who they were and who they had to be. And it was destroying their lives.

Every morning, Marsing realized, he and most of the people around him put on their work faces in the parking lot and played their roles as employees all day. The long hours, in which overtime often became a goal in itself, meant that most of each day was spent trapped in this fraud. And when they finally got home, the sheer intensity of the day -- the disappearing edges between work and play, and the inevitable late-night and weekend crisis calls -- sealed off any chance of escape into their true selves.

Intel, as much as any high-tech company, sought to create and enforce a homogeneous employee personality. The company had long recruited engineers right out of college, who wouldn't be tainted by having worked at other companies. And, fulfilling CEO and president Andy Grove's famous words, "Only the paranoid survive," the company promulgated a siege mentality among its people. Changing this attitude could mean challenging what lay at the heart of Intel's phenomenal success.

Yet in the face of those reasons to run away, Marsing chose to stay. He realized that he was committed to Intel and proud of its achievements. His mission, he saw, was to help the company prepare for a new century: "I wanted to try to develop the next generation of fab managers so that they could create an operating environment where balance exists. There had to be a way to work in this environment without being killed by it."

But what was that way? Marsing had no idea; he'd never heard of any alternative management model. So he turned to philosophers and some of the most outré management thinkers. He started with the economist and philosopher Joseph Schumpeter. Then on to Zen Buddhism. Next, physicist David Boehm.

He was still looking for answers when, in early 1992, he got the call: Marsing was named plant manager of the soon-to-be-constructed Fab II, the largest capital investment any chip company had ever made. The pressure to succeed would be immense. But this was the chance that Marsing had been waiting for.

He would go out in the hot sun and sit in the middle of the vacant field where the plant would stand, and dream: "The people who worked for me thought I was going crazy," Marsing recalls. "But I could just imagine that building rising up around me."

Now he could conduct his experiment in the greatest laboratory on earth.