Example research essay topic: Chief Operating Officer Santa Clara - 1,669 words

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The silicon ''brains'' of 85 percent of all personal computers in the world are manufactured by Intel Corporation, a powerhouse making semiconductors and computer microprocessors. Just some years ago Intel was known as one of the most successful and profitable technology enterprise with a long history of growth and significant performance in the world. Five years ago the Companys management launched the strategy of expanding into new large segments of information and communication market, but surprisingly lately the Company was in its worse economical condition for the last 15 years. Lowering economical indexes, criticism and pessimistic expectations of analysts, product shortages and delays make the Chef Executive Officer of the Company Craig R. Barrett think about his legacy in negative lights, as he has only three years till his mandatory retirement age.

Before starting his work for Intel in 1974 as a technology manager, Craig R Barrett was a professor of material science at Stanford University. Effective chairmen of the Company, Gordon E. Moore and Andrew S. Grove, fathers of the Company, who led Intel to be one of the most flourishing technology enterprise in the world, introduced Barrett as a Head of the manufacturing department in 1985 and later on in 1993 as a Chief Operating Officer.

By the times when Barrett became one of the leaders of the Company, Intel has been suffering hard times of producing memory chips and sophisticated microprocessors, so Barrett's strategy of boosting of both quality and output brought to profits and success. Barrett's most significant improvement was the ''copy exactly'' program, showing that a certain chip produced at one plant would be qualitatively like the same chip manufactured in another plant. During the period, when Andrew Groove has been occupying the position of Intel's CEO, Barrett was responsible for only production processes, so he could guarantee smooth work of manufacturing branches. Being Chief Operating Officer, he became well-known in the microprocessor industry and supposed to be one of the creators of great successes of the Company. As soon as Groove became a chairman of Intel, Barrett succeeded the title of the Companys President. His first developments as CEO demonstrated the tendency of Intel to gradual management transitions and the majority of his first steps as slight reformatory brought to positive reaction of customers and specialists.

PC market was raising and Intel had such steady and strong positions in it that could be scarcely harmed by competitors or tricks of the government. But hard times came soon. The idea was to spread Intel's products all around: to make chips and processors for cellular phones, appliances, to deal with broadband connection and Web-hosting, to occupy more and more territories of growing technological market. Huge efforts were spent; huge human resources were used and big investments were done - especially into industrial and technical researches. A great deal of improvements and striking business decisions were made, Barrett has been creating more and more production teams for his branches, constantly offering good and smart innovations for his customers as increasing the speed of Internet connection, making work of computers more effective, decreasing the price of the chips and make rival companies go crazy. But something did not work, Intel was failing to succeed in such many directions, and unexpectedly many projects (especially joint projects with other famous companies, like Dell, Motorola or Hewlett Packard), which were very well organized, precalculate d and supported with money funds, did not bring expected reward and profits.

Thats why it became obvious that recent strategy of enhancing Intel's business resulted sadly: $ 4 billion of investments produced almost nothing, besides, the Company had to urgently give up rendering of some services, like e-commerce and hosting for small businesses, and lose some positions at information-appliance segments in Europe. One of the most probable reasons of such fiasco of Barrett's course is too much of expansion and decentralization of the Company. Barrett's strategy of active extension caused endless rebuilding of business units of Intel, creating, merging or combining of working groups and departments took place almost every quarter for more than three years. Such frequent changes and reorganization, new people and appointments have distracted the attention from the core business of Intel, manufacturing of CPUs. Besides, increasing delegation of decision-making and responsibility unbalanced the structure of the Company, made employees become less aware of their role and goals. There were also claims about the lack of qualification of the high level managers: management analysts noticed the tend of placing old chip designer engineers in charge of new technological or communication departments of Intel, which had hardly something to do with semiconductor manufacturing.

Important role in loss of the profitability of the company belongs to the personality of Craig Barrett himself, his ability to lead the Company and form its policy. On the one hand, he was known as busy manager, his schedule was packed with endless business trips and meetings till midnight. He gained respect from his subordinates with his attentiveness, successful recruitment policy, and his speeches were always opened and effective. But on the other hand, according to his former collaborators, the competitiveness of Andy Groove in strategy and tactic of Intel was really high, at the same time as practical vision of Barrett is still brilliant, so the majority wishes the duo of Groove and Barrett to assemble again and find the decisions on recovering from this crisis. But not everything was dependent only on Barrett's vision of his business.

There is also a known tendency of stagnation in computer technology market, caused by overcapacity of the products and decreasing demand. And, as one of the biggest players at the market, Intel receives the strongest hits, like 52 % of lowering of the Companys revenues (from $ 33. 7 billion in 2000 to $ 25. 5 billion in 2001) and more than 80 % of lowering of its profits (from $ 10. 5 billion in 2000 to $ 773 million in 2001). Besides, it seems like some marketing targets were chosen wrong: despite of $ 2 billion of investments into Web-hosting business, Intel is still has completely no demand to be competitive in this branch. Also, tragic events of September 11 did not change Barrett's goals and economical expectations, but it cost 5, 000 cut of workplaces for his employees, bringing the workforce to 80, 000.

Terroristic attack also caused losses at the stocks market, estimated like from $ 26 to $ 20 of nominal price. With the temper incident to Barrett, he sincerely defends his chosen strategy and bewails its failure. Intel's CEO underlines, that this strategy was not created for nothing and those shortages, lacks and failures can be a usual affects of wide activity in a number of new market territories, he calls them as side effects. Barrett had so much greater plans as to advancing of his business; he wanted to operate not only at information and communication fields, he aspired to develop his company at segments of Internet communication (e-commerce), mobile phones and palm computers.

These tactics were not put into practice properly. Also, Barrett appeals to economic slump in the whole industry, saying that Intel spent overwhelming money (about 45 % of the Companys revenues) into technological research, marketing and positioning, that advantages Intel from its competitors in overcoming this economical decrease in much better shape and condition. On this point he received support from the Chairman of Microsoft Corp. William H. Gates, who admires some smart decisions of Intel, directed onto future achievements.

Inspired by some positive opinions of colleagues and specialists, Craig Barrett is not going to give up his thoughts about bringing Intel to total success again. After closing of some not profitable branches, learning the lessons from own mistakes and rearranging of the strategy, Intel is making new bright openings at its main field of PC processors again. For example, at the beginning of 2004 Barrett announced and commented on transformations of the Companys 32 -bit processor line through 64 -bit extensions as a branch of an Intel end-to-end strategy, which would give opportunity for the Company to operate at the segments of high-end enterprise applications and up to single-processor devices. According to Barrett, these extensions will bring 64 -bit systems to more efficient processing of 32 -bit applications through access to a larger size of memory address space, which has always been Intel's strategy on 64 -bit extensions dating back to Intel's last IDF. Barrett understands very well that he must not give up blindly all his previous ideas regarding to the business fields on which Intel could not manage to succeed. Yes, his tactic of wide expansion in technological market did not bring to striking success and damaged the Companys economical indexes and reputation.

But from his old times, Intel's CEO knows the way to fix the situation, and his answer is: manufacturing. He is spending more than 25 % of the revenues just for technological improvements of own production lines and pays a great deal of attention on modernizing his facilities in order to lower the costs and, as a result, also the consumer price. Besides, Intel still has very strong chain of partners and collaborators at the branch of software industry: the majority of PC running programs is created for exactly Intel's microprocessors, so Barrett's products became a sort of standard for personal computers worldwide. Intel has a large steady market and if to unite shrewd and progressive technological decisions of the Companys management with prudent and careful marketing policy, the slogan of Craig Barrett: Intel everywhere will be implemented into life and bring a good fame for the Companys good work. REFERENCES: Cliff Edwards in Santa Clara (Calif. ), Ira Sager (New York) and bureau reports. Intel.

Can CEO Craig Barrett reverse the slide? Business Week; October 15, 2001; Cliff Edwards in Santa Clara (Calif. ), Moon Ihlwan (Seoul), Andy Reinhardt (Paris). Intel. What is CEO Craig Barrett up to? Business Week; March 8, 2004; Craig R.

Barrett: Intel's Ironman Business Week; January 11, 1999;

Research essay sample on Chief Operating Officer Santa Clara