It’s a new year and New Year’s resolutions may be on your mind. You’ll find some helpful hints on making resolutions, or just getting your career into gear, in Steve Sanghi’s new book, “Ask Steve: Everyday business advice from a successful CEO.” Sanghi based his new book on a decade’s worth of advice columns he wrote for the “Arizona Republic” newspaper from 2004 to 2014. The advice Sangi dispenses is based on his four decades of industry experience, starting with Intel and ending with him extracting Microchip, a growing semiconductor company, from the ashes of General Instrument Microelectronics back in 1990. (You’ll find that story here: “A History of Early Microcontrollers, Part 9: The General Instruments PIC1650.”) Sanghi retired as Microchip’s CEO in 2021 and started publishing books. (See “Steve Sanghi’s new ‘Up And To The Right’ book chronicles Microchip’s journey from nearly bankrupt to Top-20 semiconductor maker.”) However, he took back the reins as interim Microchip CEO in November and, last month, joined Intel’s board of directors. So much for retirement.
Sanghi collected and organized his “Arizona Republic” advice columns into a book because the material is no longer online, but Sanghi believes the advice is still very relevant.
“Ask Steve: Everyday business advice from a successful CEO” compiles business, career, and management advice from 210 newspaper columns authored by Steve Sanghi over a 10-year period. Image credit: Steve Sanghi
The book is about 300 pages long and contains nearly 30 chapters that divide the advice columns by topic. Here are the chapter titles:
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Job promotion at work
Chapter 3: Layoffs
Chapter 4: Benefits at work
Chapter 5: Discrimination and harassment at work
Chapter 6: Dealing with employees
Chapter 7: Navigating company mergers
Chapter 8: Dress code at work
Chapter 9: Functioning of a team
Chapter 10: Coping with management shortfalls
Chapter 11: Marketing, selling and financial analysts
Chapter 12: Resources to finance and grow your business
Chapter 13: 401K savings plan, IRAs, and pensions
Chapter 14: Investing your money
Chapter 15: Estate planning
Chapter 16: Ex-employees and finding a job
Chapter 17: Proper email and phone etiquette in the office
Chapter 18: Political views and impact of elections
Chapter 19: Work-life balance
Chapter 20: Outsourcing and changes in business
Chapter 21: Global financial crisis and housing crisis
Chapter 22: Higher education and applied skills
Chapter 23: Consumer-related questions
Chapter 24: International business issues
Chapter 25: Legal questions
Chapter 26: Miscellaneous topics
Chapter 27: About executives and managers
As you can see from the titles, Sanghi dispenses advice on the full gamut of challenges you’re likely to face over the course of your career. His advice is informed by his long career in semiconductors. He started as an independent contributor at Intel in 1978, joined Wafer Scale Integration as VP of operations ten years later, and then led Microchip as President and CEO for more than 30 years until his retirement. You may not like his advice, but it’s an honest perspective from someone with deep managerial experience in semiconductor manufacturing, including some substantial M&A experience.
Threaded throughout the book, you’ll find advice based on one of his fundamental philosophies, which he calls the Weakness Principle. When I interviewed Sanghi in preparation for this article, he explained the Weakness Principle like this:
“When the employee starts out young working in a company based on their education in college or community, college, or whatever, they use their strengths to propel their career upwards, and that is the right thing to do. That’s what everybody should do as they begin.
“Every human being comes with a lot of weaknesses, too. and employees largely tend to ignore their weaknesses and propel their career with their strengths. It works very well for a long time in their career, because, you know, the strengths are the upward force that propels a career upwards. But weaknesses are the downward force which propels your career downwards. So, if you yell at employee, you don’t come to work on time, you’re not a team player, you talk loud to others, you stab other people in the back. You got a lot of these weaknesses that come from a, you know high school kind of mentality. You know they hurt you here and there in your career, but probably not enough to stop your ascent through engineer, senior engineer, principal engineer, maybe even become a supervisor, maybe even become a manager.
“But then a point comes when your upward force from your strength is counterbalanced by the downward force by your weakness, to a point where your career is stalled. You reach a stall point.
“I’ve had numerous people come to me over the course of my 40-year career, saying that ‘I got my review. I expected to be promoted. I’ve done all these good things, but my manager didn’t promote me, and told me all my weaknesses.’
“Numerous times people have come to me, and I always give them the same answer. I say, “You know, you’ve reached a career stall point. And if I look back in your review, you probably got the same message last year.” When I look at their review, they got the same message last year, but they’re not listening. They’re stuck on, ‘How good I am. How good a job I did.’
“You did a great job. What your manager is looking for is you growing up now to mentor other people, to be a cultural role model to, you know, to come in on time, to be a team player to, you know, do all these things that you’re not doing.”
I think that Sanghi’s Weakness Principle is an actionable restatement of the Peter Principle, first promoted by Laurence Peter, who observed that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence.” Following the Peter Principle, employees are promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they finally reach a level at which they are no longer competent. At that point, their career stalls.
Sanghi’s Weakness Principle reinterprets the Peter Principle and transforms it into something you can address. His advice is to initiate a 360-degree review, which is a performance evaluation that provides feedback from multiple sources to give a more complete picture of an employee’s performance. I asked for a better definition during my discussion with Sanghi and he provided this one:
“Usually, you partner with human resources [HR] and ask them to conduct the review. Human resources will then confidentially speak with your boss, your boss’s boss, your subordinates, if you have them, your coworkers, people from other departments, some of your internal customers. If you’re a design engineer, if you develop a product and it goes to production, then production is your internal customer.”
This feedback provides other people’s assessments of the job you’re doing. Sanghi continued:
“They look at you from the standpoint of your empowerment, your mentorship, your allocation of resources, what the employees are saying about you. And then they compile it and give you the feedback on a confidential basis. ‘This is what everybody’s saying. Here are the things that are coming out from a 360-degree view. And here are the weaknesses that are coming out from a 360-degree review.’
“Now, the output of that 360-degree review usually does not go to your boss. It is only really for you, and it’s up to you to do something about it, or not do something about it. The only recommendation from your boss is that you should do something about it. In most cases, they [the people providing the 360-degree feedback] will agree with what the boss is telling you already. But there could be some other things. If there are multiple weaknesses, you can’t work out on all of them, you know, at one time. Pick one or two and focus on them for the next year.
“If you do that, then you will see that the others will start to see you as a leader, a role model. Over time, you’ll be seen as someone who creates a team atmosphere, someone who praises others in public, criticizes them in private, doesn’t put other people down, is not a workplace bully, etc. And, lo and behold, you’ll find yourself getting promoted to the next job.”
I told Sanghi that his experiences with HR departments seem much rosier than my experiences. Frankly, I’ve found HR departments to be defenders of the corporate line, more interested in preventing lawsuits than growing employees. Sanghi replied:
“Yeah. I did hear that from several readers in rebuttals, that the HR Departments are largely there to protect the company from the lawsuits, and you know that probably, that was true years ago. And in many countries, it could be true today, because, you know, many companies haven’t changed, or haven’t grown to the New World with all the protections and employees rising up, and harassment laws and issues and all that, some companies may still not have changed.
“But HR Departments have come a long way. You know my first book, ‘Driving Excellence,’ I wrote it with, co-authored with my director of human resources, Michael Jones, and if you read that book, it kind of shows you how far HR Departments have come, as a partner in the success of the company representing the employees.
“But I do agree with my readers who wrote that their experience with the HR Department is not good, and I take it at face value.”
Finally, I asked Sanghi about the impact that these columns in the “Arizona Republic” had on Microchip’s fortunes. He wrote some 210 columns, and that represents a large time investment for the CEO of any company. I wondered if that investment of time paid off for Microchip. Sangi replied:
“You know, when I started writing the column, Microchip was still a small company. I think we were probably about a $600 million kind of company. And you know, then I grew it to $7 billion by the time I was leaving. And, you know, that small company is constantly competing with multi-billion-dollar companies: Motorola, Intel, STMicro, Infineon, Texas Instruments, Linear Technology, Maxim, Analog Devices, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, and NEC that became Renesas…
“And, you know, for a small company, it’s always difficult to get newspaper space. Back then… a lot of it was in print. Today, it’s all on the web. But you know, people like yourself have a huge number of sources. You write about the whole industry. And when you’re competing with a company ten times larger than you, $5 billion rather than $500 million, with multiple divisions, they’re constantly putting out products and they’re in all the shows. So, they dominate the space, and it is difficult to be noticed.
“When this column appeared, especially when it became successful…, it got picked up in San Jose, it got picked up nationally, and it became very popular because Arizona Republic is a sister publication of ‘U.S.A. Today.’ It gave us an enormous visibility in terms of leadership culture.
“You know how systematically we think about things. If this is what the CEO is doing, the company must have a great culture and must be free from harassment and discrimination, and must have a great HR Department who helps people, etc. All those things were correct for Microchip. And over the course of 30 or 31 years, I think we had an order of magnitude fewer complaints from employees regarding harassment, discrimination, and others. I would say… because of the culture we built and the propagation of all that through the column, it was just a tremendous benefit to Microchip.
“I wrote it over ten years. It probably ended in…somewhere in the 2014 or 2015 timeframe. By that time, we had, you know, grown significantly. We hired a lot of people. We attracted a lot of investors. We attracted good board members; we attracted customers.
“Many times, I’d visit customers, and you know, you know they’ll ask me about the column I wrote last Sunday. It was a constant topic, and I, and I just think many companies of that size would be honored and proud to have that kind of opportunity. It’s rare.”
Here, I fully concur with Sanghi’s conclusions. His extra effort to write and publish these advice columns were of material benefit to Microchip. Although it’s impossible to measure the percentage of Microchip’s multi-billion-dollar revenue attributable to Sanghi’s efforts to gain mindshare for the company through his columns, the results are incontrovertible.
So, if you’re thinking about career-oriented resolutions for the new year, perhaps your first resolution should be to purchase a copy of Sanghi’s book, read it, and glean some actionable tasks from its chapters.
