Concentrating all resources on the Intel campaign (1994)

A concentration born of survival

What set this project apart was less any cleverness of method than the way a situation in which it could not afford to lose drove all of the organization’s energy onto a single point. With no way back after the carbide exit and three straight years of falling sales and profits, President Yu Endo funnelled almost the entire R&D budget into one theme, tore its core people out of their old departments, and set a deadline — disband if it produced no result within two years. A manager who regretted cutting two hundred jobs during the oil-shock years, and who had vowed on taking the presidency never again to lay off staff, allowed no compromise whatever in the business itself. Protecting people on one side and going all-in on the bet on the other, those two faces lived together in him.

That said, the bet paid off in part because it coincided with the moment Intel switched its package material from ceramic to plastic. Endo himself assumed that even the plastic package, his new breadwinner, would be displaced by something else the following year, and left in place a mechanism to develop the next generation in parallel. This refusal to settle into a single success would go on to sustain both the Intel dependence and the overseas expansion that followed. What happens when a survival-driven concentration on one point meshes with an external change — Ibiden’s metamorphosis into a semiconductor-materials maker is one answer to that question.