Killer Results Without Killing Yourself

The Human Test

in the world of fabs, the ultimate test comes at startup, when the fab is trying to convert diagrams and flow charts into real-life mass production. And this is also the ultimate test of Marsing's management philosophy. The product is an eight-inch silicon wafer covered with a grid of several hundred integrated circuit chips (ICs) -- each worth as much as $1,000. One mistake on a wafer can cost $250,000 or more. And mistakes are easy: each of those hundreds of ICs contains millions of individual circuits, none much larger than bacteria. Billions of them must be made correctly each day.

With so much that can go wrong, nerves are frayed, tempers explosive.

So we visit Marsing just two days after Fab II "went to silicon."

Almost everything -- meetings, telephone calls, interviews -- seems to take place in a subdued tone. Marsing moves through the day calmly, his voice sometimes so soft as to be unintelligible. It's only later that it hits you: in one of the toughest manufacturing environments anywhere, in the center of its most stressful period, there are no raised voices, no barely controlled outbursts. The man whose heart once exploded over bad yield rates now navigates a far tougher management challenge without breaking a sweat.

Marsing, in a job that once nearly destroyed him, has made the day look effortless. He is not a philosopher but an extraordinarily adept businessman; his vision is his actions.

What Can I Do for You?

It's a hot summer New Mexico morning as Marsing sips the last of his coffee. He's already spent a half hour meditating, as he did before going to bed last night. Marsing's youngest child, one-year-old Hannah, is still asleep, but three-year-old Elliot is up and wandering grumpily through the house. He is ushered into the kitchen for breakfast by Marsing's wife, Vicki, who is also on her way to work at Intel, where she is an engineering manager. The atmosphere is casual and relaxed.

So is Marsing. He's wearing chinos and a work shirt. Combined with a shock of unruly brown hair and wire-rimmed glasses, he looks less like a high-tech executive and more like a high school civics teacher who also coaches the wrestling team.

At 7:40 a.m. he climbs into the family's new Toyota Land Cruiser and starts down the hill to the wide plateau below. Even from here, 10 miles away, it's hard to miss the Intel plant. The two giant fabs, along with a third, Fab 7, stretch across a ridge above Rio Rancho, dominating the view.

At 7:56 a.m. Marsing pulls into a nonreserved parking place. He looks up at the immense white building, and it's clear that he's still in awe of Fab II: five stories and 170,000 square feet of clean room, the ultrapure area where chips are made; 1,400 employees with nearly 500 more soon to be added; equipment that can draw lines on silicon wafers just 1/500,000th of an inch across; the potential to generate revenues in excess of $5 billion per year. And it all works.

Marsing sprints up the five flights of stairs to his office to start the day. He had assumed that running such a facility had no precedent. Then a few months ago he taped a documentary on cable about life on an aircraft carrier: an immense structure costing billions of dollars, filled with a couple thousand highly trained specialists focused on a vital mission, with no room for error. The similarities were stunning. The only difference Marsing could see was that the captain of the carrier had to cope with a 40% annual turnover from completed enlistments, retirements and transfers. And then it struck Marsing that, given Intel's expansion plans for the next few years, the change among his employees would be just as dramatic.

He watched the tape over and over and showed it to his subordinates. He even used a company meeting in San Diego as an excuse to tour a U.S. Navy carrier. The result was a subtle shift in command to imitate the Navy captain/executive officer model: Marsing took on a more external, strategic role, and his assistant, factory manager Brian L. Harrison, moved into position as the internal, executive officer, a role roughly equivalent to a full plant manager in the rest of the industry.

"Marsing just thinks differently from other fab managers," Harrison says. "There is a mold for fab managers. They're hired as engineers and then pass through a series of filters as they come up. Somehow Marsing went through those filters, got to this level, and still sees things from a different perspective: more holistically, I guess, where others think in discrete details."

Marsing's morning is spent in one-on-one meetings with his direct reports, discussing various plant activities. After each presentation, Marsing asks, "OK, now what can I do for you?"