Happy Nice Mall

A few days later she got a surprise call from Mr. Grove. The Hungarian-born executive, then the chairman of Intel, who later wrote the management book “Only the Paranoid Survives,” had built a culture in which subordinates were encouraged to challenge their superiors if they could hold their positions. Mr. Grove began mentoring Mr. Gelsinger, a relationship that lasted thirty years.

In 1986, Mr. Grove persuaded Mr. Gelsinger not to pursue a PhD at Stanford University and instead made him, at age 24, leader of a 100-person team that designed Intel’s 80486 microprocessor. Mr. Gelsinger eventually won eight patents, becoming Intel’s youngest vice president in 1992 and the first to hold the title of chief technology officer in 2001.

Intel’s climb up the ladder has been shaped by another priority: its faith.

Despite having grown up in the mainstream United Church of Christ, Mr. Gelsinger said he wasn’t really a Christian until he went to the nondenominational church in Silicon Valley, where he met his later wife, Linda Fortune. In 1980, he heard the minister at that church quote Revelations.

After Mr. Gelsinger became a born-again Christian, he privately wrestled over whether to join the clergy. In a 2019 oral history run by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, he said he had finally decided to become a “workplace minister”: he works for Intel.”

Intel Plugs

In the mid-2000s, Mr. Gelsinger’s fundamentals within Intel changed. Mr Grove retired as chairman of the board in 2004. another manager, Paul OtelliniHe was appointed CEO in 2005. Mr. Gelsinger said there was “a dissonant voice” in Intel’s senior executive team.

Mr Otellini pushed him to go, said Mr Gelsinger. (Mr Otellini died in 2017.) In 2009, Mr. Gelsinger accepted an offer to become president and chief operating officer of EMC, a manufacturer of data storage equipment.

It was very painful to leave Intel after 30 years as a company man. “I was very angry and emotional about leaving,” said Mr Gelsinger.