Competition, Cooperation, and Creative Contention
Mark Papermaster, CTO of AMD, discusses how re-focusing the company and building with the idea of creative contention in mind helped AMD emerge victorious after being on the brink of failure.
Imagine this. You and one other suspect have been arrested for a crime. You are taken to separate interrogation rooms where the cops give you two options: you can either confess that you and your accomplice committed the crime or you can stay silent and not confess.
Here’s the catch:
If you confess, and your partner does not confess, you will go free.
If you do not confess, but your partner does, then you will be convicted of the maximum sentence.
If you both confess, you will both receive mild sentences.
If neither of you confess, you will both be free within hours.
What do you do?
What is described above is a famous Game Theory called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Why bring this up? Because it illustrates an idea that Mark Papermaster, the CTO and EVP of AMD, laid out to describe how he thinks about getting ahead in the industry.
Papermaster, who was responsible for re-designing the engineering processes at AMD, describes capitalism that our society is based on as an endless war, and like the strategists on the battlefield sometimes you have to reach across the divide for a bigger prize.
“There are other wars that aren’t good and where we need to actually collaborate,” he said. “So, you hear the phrase…coopetition. What does that mean? It means that for the technology industry to thrive, you’ve gotta be clear on where we’re going to duke it out and go head to head with one another on capabilities, but where do we need to cooperate.”
AMD has had a long and tumultuous history. There were times when cooperation was required and there were other times when Mark and AMD’s CEO, Lisa Su, were forced to go out on a limb and push AMD to a point no company would go to in order to win the war for computing power. Why? Because if they didn’t AMD would be left for dead on the battlefield.
It was a strange time to hop on the AMD boat. But for Papermaster, he had experience that he knew he could lean on to help him lead the way. For instance, to make things work at AMD, Papermaster took inspiration from his time working for Apple.
“The iPhone 4 was, for me, a lesson in technology courage,” Papermaster said. “It was new everything. The processing technology was new underneath, it was using new technology. We had to work very, very closely with the semiconductor partner at the time.”
What he learned from Apple founder Steve Jobs was that high risk should be managed and the importance of passion for the mission.
“[When you] get the right team behind [the project], get a team that’s passionate and committed and have that shared vision that what you do can really have an impact on others, it’s incredibly motivating,” Papermaster said. “I was motivated. Our teams were motivated. And so, what I realized is that I was looking to do that same kind of impact on where I had spent most of my career and that’s computing.”
Taking the position of CTO at AMD was a risk. The company had a history of successes creating processors, microprocessors and semiconductors, but was hit by the 2009 recession that forced the company to lay off 1000 people in that year and another 1400 more a few years later. But Papermaster loved the challenge and the opportunities it presented.
He had a new vision for AMD.
“It was about bringing competition back, bringing innovation back to where there’s frankly been a stagnation,” Papermaster said. “And think about PCs at the time — generation after generation, they weren’t getting better. It really needed a punch of innovation, the same thing with what we felt we could do in gaming and in server computing. So, it was just an opportunity that couldn’t be passed by.”
But the challenges AMD faced were not only limited to the recession. The fundamentals of the industry were also changing and data was starting to explode, mobile phones were coming out with more vivid and realistic displays, which needed higher and higher performance computing. The company needed to pivot and not everyone at the company bought into the changes.
How did they do it and how did AMD become nimble and use leapfrogging and creative contention to survive? Tune in to Business X factors to find out.
— -
Business X factors is produced by Mission.org and brought to you by Hyland.
For over a decade, Hyland has been named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms, leading the way to help people get the information they need when and where they need it. More than half of 2019 Fortune 100 companies rely on Hyland to help them create more meaningful connections with the people they serve. When your focus is on the people you serve, Hyland stands behind you. Hyland is your X factor for better performance. Go to Hyland.com/insights to learn more.
