Question

Please summarize in bulletins what read from the article below. Also after summarizing please write a question that you would ask the class about this article with the answer after.

For me, the recent events in the Middle East have been a painful reminder of one of the most important lessons for any leader: You don’t really know what it’s like to run a business until you’ve had to do it amid the turmoil of war. In 1991, I was the general manager of Intel’s operation in Israel, which at the time was (and still today is) the company’s largest unit outside the United States. During the First Gulf War, I faced what was the most difficult test of my entire career: whether to keep Intel Israel up and running during Iraq’s Scud missile strikes against Israel or close the operations until the crisis passed. Of course, many businesses keep functioning during wartime. But in the days before the First Gulf War, Israel confronted what appeared to be an unprecedented threat. The Israeli military assumed that Iraqi missiles would be carrying chemical weapons. The government distributed gas masks and ordered every household to prepare a special sealed room in case of chemical attack. Most serious from a business point of view, in anticipation of the missile strikes, the Israeli civil defense authority directed all nonessential businesses to close and their employees to remain at home. The radical uncertainty of the situation – not knowing how many missiles would fall, where they would fall, what kind of destruction they would inflict–threatened to bring our business to a halt, even before a single missile had been launched. It would have been easy to follow the civil defense directive and close down. Everyone was doing it, and we were not part of the war effort. Intel’s senior executives in California would have un- YEL MAG CYAN BLACK derstood. Many of our employees would probably have appreciated the opportunity to focus on preparing their families for the attacks. And yet I chose to ignore the government directive, keep our operations open, and ask our employees to continue to come to work. Some people thought I was being irresponsible. What right did I have to risk people’s lives in time of war? Others thought I was crazy. What if any of our employees were killed? What if the government took legal action? What if disgruntled employees went to the press? Despite these risks, I decided to move ahead,and Intel’s employees responded. In the first days of the Scud attacks, when businesses throughout the nation were closed, roughly 80% of Intel’s employees showed up, day in and day out, night shifts included. Thanks to their performance, Intel Israel was one of the few businesses in Israel (and our Jerusalem semiconductor fabrication plant the only manufacturing operation) to remain open throughout the entire six weeks of the war. Not only did we keep our commitments to global Intel, we also established the reputation that, over time, would allow us to grow Intel Israel into an important center of excellence for the corporation, Israel’s largest private employer, and a cornerstone of Israel’s dynamic high-tech economy. A Different Kind of War I had left Israel in the early 1960s to get a PhD in electrical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, but my dream had always been to bring back a new body of knowledge to Israel and help found a new field of innovation and industry. So in 1974, I returned to set up Intel’s first overseas unit, a small chip design center in Haifa. Few people know it, but we designed the microprocessor for the original IBM personal computer. And in 1984, we opened the company’s first chip fabrication plant outside the United States, in Jerusalem. By the early 1990s, Intel Israel was a key outpost of Intel’s global production system. The Jerusalem fab was responsible for about three-quarters of the global output of the 386 microprocessor, at the time the company’s best-selling product. Meanwhile, our development center in Haifa was hard at work on new products that would be critical to Intel’s future, including key components of what would become the Pentium microprocessor. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, we knew there was a good chance december 2006 125 there would be a war. So I appointed a task force of senior managers to develop a contingency plan in case Israel was drawn into the conflict. At the time, we were assuming it would be a conventional war, and we were confident that we could handle it. That kind of war was not exactly new to Israel; we had had plenty of experience with what it would mean for our business during Israel’s incursion into Lebanon in 1982. As a result, we made plans for replacing key personnel called up to the military and for operating the plant with a skeleton crew. But almost from the moment we finalized our contingency plan, it became clear that this war would be very different. The politics of the U.S.-created antiIraq coalition made it imperative that Israel stay out of the war. For that very reason, it was in Saddam Hussein’s interest to provoke Israel into intervening. By September, U.S. satellites had detected the transport of ballistic missiles to western Iraq – a mere seven minutes’ travel time from Tel Aviv. Israeli defense officials were saying that a chemical attack on the country’s major population centers was likely – a belief that prompted them to lease two batteries of Patriot antiaircraft missiles, adapted for use against ballistic missiles, from the United States. Instead of being behind the lines of the war zone, which we were used to, we ran the risk of being the war zone. In October, tensions mounted when the government issued every Israeli a personal protection kit, complete with gas mask and atropine injectors, to combat chemical poisoning. There was something about receiving those kits, being instructed to carry your gas mask with you wherever you went, and having to prepare a sealed room in your house or apartment that brought the uncertainty and potential danger of the situation home in a palpable way. By the turn of the year, as the U.S.’s January 15th deadline for Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait drew near, my disquiet had grown. Many airlines suspended flights to Israel. The governments of the United States and Great Britain advised their nationals to consider leaving the country. Then on Tuesday the 15th itself, the Israeli government announced that all schools would be closed for the rest of the week. Slowly it was dawning on me that our contingency plan might be irrelevant to what was likely to be anything but an ordinary war. And yet, despite all these warning signs, it still came as a surprise when I woke up on Wednesday, January 16th, to the news on the radio that, in anticipation of the start of hostilities and likely missile attacks, the Israeli civil defense authority was directing businesses to close and everyone but essential emergency personnel to remain home. It was only then that I fully understood: We were facing a completely different kind of problem than the one we had anticipated. This wasn’t just a matter of calling up reserves. The government was telling us that nobody should come to work. I immediately called a meeting of the task force at the Jerusalem fab.

Answer 1

Summary:

• In 1991, Dov Frohman was the general manager of Intel in Israel. Intel Israel at that time was the company’s largest unit outside United States
• During First Gulf war, Israeli civil defense authority feared Iraq would drop missiles carrying chemical weapons. Hence it had asked all non-essential business to close and employees to remain home. All households were provided with masks and were asked to prepare a special sealed room in their house
• Despite government warning, Dov opened all of Intel’s operations and asked employees to come for work
• About 80% of employees came to work day and night during the entire six weeks of war. This helped Intel to meet its global targets and propelled Intel’s status as a center of excellence, and a cornerstone for Israel’s high tech economy
• Dov Frohman was an Israeli who left his country in 1960 to get a PhD in Electrical Engineering from University of California
• In 1974, he returned to Israel to set up its first overseas unit, a small chip design center in Haifa. In 1984, he opened a chip fabrication plant in Jerusalem. This facility by 1986 contributed two-thirds of the global export of microprocessor
• In 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, Dov was appointed as a part of task force to develop a contingency plan. The committee made plans to replace key personnel and to run the plan with a skeleton crew (crew with few critical members) with military’s permission
• But just when the contingency plan was finalized the crew came to realize the fact that this war was different from previous ones
• US had asked Israel to not intervene in this war but Saddam Hussain wanted Israel to participate. US satellites at that time detected ballistic missiles being transported to western Iraq near Tel Aviv.
• As deadline given by US to Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait neared, US suspended all flights to Israel, asked its citizens in Israel to return at the earliest.
• The Israeli government shut down schools and offices and asked employees to not go for work in the present condition. The government issued masks to households and asked again its citizens to prepare a special sealed room. It also brought missiles to counter US attack
• All these developments made Dov realize that this was not an ordinary situation and hence called up an emergency meeting in Jerusalem facility

Question:

Explain the contribution of Dov Frohman to developing Intel as the cornerstone of Israel’s high tech economy

Answer:

Dov Frohman was the first person to bring Intel outside of United States by setting up a small chip center in Haifa in the year 1974. In a span of 10 years the organization grew multifold in his leadership which resulted in Intel setting up its chip fabrication plant in Jerusalem. Roughly in a span of 2 years of setting up, it contributed to two thirds of the chips being exported globally, thereby providing local employment opportunities to Israel and transforming it to the key outpost of Intel’s global production system