Robert Noyce saw possibilities few others could see.

And he believed in his vision even when colleagues scoffed.

For example, back in 1965 when push-button phones were novelties and computers filled entire rooms, not just the corners of desks, Noyce predicted the world would soon see "portable telephones, personal paging systems and palm-sized TVs."

As Leslie Berlin wrote in her newly published biography, "The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley": "His sense of near limitless possibility led Noyce to pursue technical hunches that his colleagues believed were dead ends."

Noyce's willingness to go after the seemingly unattainable helped him co-invent the integrated circuit.

Also, his management style encouraged others — and is a big reason for the success of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, both companies he helped found.

"Noyce was forever pushing people to take their own ideas beyond where they believed they could go," Berlin wrote.

Fearless And Smart

Noyce, the son of a minister, grew up in the Midwest during the Depression. As a child, he demonstrated traits that would stand him in good stead as adult. For one thing, he was rambunctious and had no fear. He and his brothers built a glider that Robert flew off the roof of the family's home.

He also clearly was a genius. He took college level physics courses in high school and was offered a graduate assistantship by Miami (Ohio) University if he would enroll there as an undergraduate.

Noyce's first job after getting his doctorate was in the R&D department for Philco, where he helped launch a program to develop proprietary transistors. His work there taught him valuable lessons he used when he founded his own firm.

For one, research at Philco was not abstract. It always was tied to practical applications. Also, his boss, Bill Bradley, encouraged his people to push ahead with ideas they believed in — even when they hit roadblocks.

"Noyce adopted Bradley's approach, always encouraging and explaining, always ready with a new idea to try if the original threatened to fail," Berlin wrote.

This contrasted sharply with his experience at his next job, where he went to work for William Shockley, at Shockley Semiconductor Labs. There, Noyce would bring results of experiments to his boss who would, Noyce wrote in a diary, "show no interest in the idea." He later said, "The message of no interest is certainly a powerful de-motivator."

It was powerful enough for Noyce and seven others to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Now he had an opportunity to do research his way. His brain usually got a kick-start from a colleague's question. Then, wrote Berlin:

"Once his attention was engaged, Noyce did not start small. . . . Instead he tried to 'think about the fundamentals of the physics' — as big a starting point as possible — and he refused to ask himself whether or not an idea ought to work according to the current research in the field.

"In his opinion, there were only two relevant questions in the earliest stages of scientific innovation: 'Why won't this work?' and 'What fundamental laws will it violate?' "

At his new company, Noyce adopted the lessons from Philco. "Pursuing science for its own sake was an ill-afforded luxury," Berlin wrote. "Thus early research . . . was almost all process-oriented, with building a salable product the fundamental goal of the research lab."

Even Noyce's award-winning work on integrated circuits was a function of practicality. "I was trying to solve a production problem," he said. "I wasn't trying to make an integrated circuit."

Then came opposition within Fairchild to continue research in this area. Early integrated circuits were expensive, and not many practical applications seemed to exist. But Noyce believed in the project and the people who were conducting the research, so he continued to fund it and encourage them.

"The job of the manager is an enabling, not a directive, job," he said. "Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now."

It was never about ego. If he liked someone else's idea, "he pushed it up the corporate hierarchy with little concern for how foolish it might have sounded or made him appear," Berlin wrote.

Although almost all of Fairchild's production was sold to the government, Noyce was opposed to government financing of research. He resented the way federal requests for proposals were structured in a way that the government assumed everyone bidding was a crook.

Also, he said, "Government funding of R&D has a deadening effect on the incentives of the people. They know that (their work) is for the government, that it is supported by government dollars and that there is a lot of waste."

As a leader, Noyce had the ability to remain calm and inspire confidence in the midst of major crises. Once, a former employee told Berlin, a manufacturing plant lost its process. No one understood why diodes that came out perfectly yesterday didn't work today.

"I said to Bob, 'My God! This is terrifying.' . . . He said, 'Oh, no. We'll figure it out.' He was completely relaxed about it. It was wonderful (and) calming to me."

Eventually, Noyce felt stymied; he was driven by a desire to do something extraordinary and he no longer felt he could do that at Fairchild. So, along with Gordon Moore, he founded Intel (for integrated electronics) in 1968 in Santa Clara, Calif.

Seeking The Best

When it came to hiring, Noyce believed in quality, not quantity. To assure that Intel was at the cutting edge, Noyce set out to hire only "perfect people," Noyce told his children. "A small bunch of people who know what they are doing can accomplish much more than a big group of people who don't know what they are doing."

Noyce became extremely wealthy, but he wasn't a hoarder. He enjoyed his money and bought places for vacations. But there was more to him than hedonism.

He regularly invested in startup companies. He even gave one teetering company a blank check so it could continue its operations.

"It's kind of my way of just paying back the system," he said — that is, he wanted to keep alive the environment that had nurtured him.
BY CURT SCHLEIER