Maintaining a Cost-Conscious Business Plan | Big Think

Maintaining a Cost-Conscious Business Plan

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Will Swope explains how Intel remains financially agile both by saving money and cutting staff.

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William A. Swope:

William A. Swope is corporate vice president and general manager of Intel's Corporate Sustainability Group. In this role, he is responsible for driving Intel's environmental efforts in the areas of policy, operations and products. Swope works with stakeholders across the company to ensure that Intel continues to build upon its industry leadership in sustainability.

Since joining Intel in 1979, Swope has held numerous roles including corporate affairs leadership, manufacturing technology planning, strategic product planning and product management. Swope was director of Digital Enterprise Brand Management, and prior to that he was general manager of the Software and Solutions Group (SSG), reporting to the president and chief operating officer of Intel. In that capacity he managed the software products and enabling efforts within SSG. From 1993 to 1995, Swope was the general manager of the Intel® Pentium® Pro processor team. Swope was promoted to vice president in 1996 and corporate vice president in 2003.

Swope received his bachelor's degree in applied physics from Tufts College. He earned his master's degree in management from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: How does Intel promote frugality?

Swope: Well, it’s establishing goals, right, which is the way we do it in Intel is we do profit-sharing. So, as we make more money, our employees make more money. We have an employee bonus and we set goals for the corporation every year. As we achieve more of those goals, we are able to, we have a variable pay structure so, again, another, right, excuse me, that employees make more money. So, first of all, we share their success, right. Second of all, people have to believe that it’s their company. It’s not a [matter] that they go to work for your company; they go to work for their company. If we are good enough, you know, in our work and the way we treat them for, it’s that if we treat them with the respect that they deserve, we give them the training they deserve, and in exchange we share our profits with them, then hopefully at least this is what’s worked out for us for our first 40 years. They have responded in kind by being careful with expenses, right. The other end of that spectrum is you have to audit, right, and you have to agree that you’ve got rules and compliance and all the mechanics of that and, you know, so, Intel is very good on, I think, hopefully, and our employees hopefully believe we’re very good at both ends in that.

Question: What is Intel’s strategy for cost-cutting while maintaining output?

Swope: If you’re in 8 businesses and you have to cut 3 of the businesses, then your output in the 3 that you cut is not going to be the same. If the topic is can we figure out intelligent ways to prune expenses such that the fundamental output of the corporation is at least minimumly affected, the answer is yes. I think that’s called good management. The other part of this is you have to know the timeframe. We invest in process technology, meaning how small we can make a transistor, you know many, many years in advance. We don’t vary that year to year. We know where we have to go. We understand it. Good times or bad, we have to invest there or our fundamental mechanism of running our company changes. So there are ways you can do with that or disaster, right, but I think you have to be pretty clear about what the timeframe is in those investments and I think that you have to continue to apply very prudent judgment about what is no longer just fundamentally essential.

Question: How do you decide to cut human resources?

Swope: We had to restructure the company a few years ago and we went from approximately 100,000 employees to approximately 83,000, where we are right now. That was incredibly painful. And we did a lot of benchmarking. We did a lot of work. We hired in outside consultants, and we said, while we are still making money, we need to understand how it is we got into the organizational situation that we’re in and what are we going to do about it, and we re-structured at a time that I think people were surprised that we re-structured and we re-structured at the time that our profitability was going up.

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