Intel’s incoming CEO, Brian Krzanich.

Krzanich, who has held roles at Intel since 1982, becomes the sixth CEO for the chip giant. But the real question is if he can help steer the company through an increasingly competitive semiconductor market as changes in the mobile arena erode the demand for Intel’s PC chips. There are also changes in the data center that aren’t hurting Intel yet, but will introduce more competition. The board seems to think he’s capable. From the release:

“Brian is a strong leader with a passion for technology and deep understanding of the business,” said Andy Bryant, chairman of Intel. “His track record of execution and strategic leadership, combined with his open-minded approach to problem solving has earned him the respect of employees, customers and partners worldwide. He has the right combination of knowledge, depth and experience to lead the company during this period of rapid technology and industry change.”

Intel’s incoming president, Renee James.

Krzanich acknowledged the changing industry in part in his canned quote in the release, referring to “ultra-mobility,” as the next era for Intel.

In a symbol of its understanding of the importance of software, the Intel board also elected Renee James as president of Intel. She also assumes her new role on May 16. James had a leadership role in Intel’s R&D division and was the chair of its McAfee, Wind River and Havok software operations, which means she probably has a lot of the insights into the threats and opportunities Intel faces, as well as understands what the chip giant can bring to bear on the market.

James also currently serves on the board of directors of Vodafone Group Plc and VMware Inc. and was chief of staff to former Intel CEO Andy Grove. Frankly, she looks like the one who can understand the reality of Intel’s position in the changing world. Hopefully she and Krzanich can bypass Intel’s usual hubris and just focus on making sure it can come out on top when the winds of change stop blowing.

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Boland co-founded phone baseband chipmaker Icera in 2002, heading up the company as president and CEO for nine years. In 2011, Nvidia — anxious to add radio chips to its mobile processor portfolio — acquired it for $367 million in cash. Boland stayed on as Nvidia’s SVP of mobile communications, but according to his LinkedIn profile Boland left the company in October.

Cambridge-based Neul makes wireless chips, but not for the cellular industry. It’s focusing on the emerging white spaces broadband segment — in particular the Weightless standard gaining traction in the U.K.

White spaces use the spectrum in between TV transmissions for two-day way data communications. The Weightless Special Interest Group hopes to use those airwaves as a backbone network for the internet of things, connecting low-power devices such as smart meters and mobile sensors.

Neul’s principal founders will remain with the company. Former CEO James Collier will become CTO, while William Webb has moved from CTO to chief strategy officer and will maintain his role as CEO of the Weightless SIG. Formed in 2010, Neul has quite the pedigree in mobile silicon. Many of the company’s key executives founded CSR, the U.K. fabless semiconductor giant. Neul, however, has only 45 employees and spent its first two years developing its first radio chip.

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Combes headed up Vodafone’s all-important Europe region from 2008 to 2012, when he found himself in an employment bind. He left Vodafone to take over as CEO of Vivendi’s SFR in France, only to see the man who hired him, Vivendi CEO Jean-Bernard Levy, ousted before Combes could take on his new role. Now Combes has landed at one of world’s biggest infrastructure vendors.

Verwaayen, as promised, is staying on until April to help Combes ease into his new job.

“Alcatel-Lucent is an unrivalled technology leader in the telecommunications industry with an immense array of talent and capabilities in R&D facing major challenges,” Combes said in a statement. “This is a company I know well and I look forward to succeeding Ben, working with the key international customers, and driving the business into sustained profitability for its customers, employees and shareholders.”

Combes is taking over a troubled Alcatel-Lucent. The company has struggled since the merger six years ago of France’s Alcatel and the U.S.’s Lucent Technologies, which was supposed to create the world’s dominant telecom vendor. Instead, Alcatel-Lucent has lost ground to many of its traditional rivals such as Sweden’s Ericsson as well as newer market entrants such as Huawei.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user mtkang

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The announcement confirms the Wall Street Journal’s report Wednesday on the resignation, though the newspapers sources seemed to disagree whether Verwaayen was forced out by the board or if the decision was mutual.

“Alcatel-Lucent has been an enormous part of my life,” Verwaayen said in an Alcatel-Lucent statement. “It was therefore a difficult decision to not seek a further term, but it was clear to me that now is an appropriate moment for the Board to seek fresh leadership to take the company forward.”

When France’s Alcatel and the U.S.’s Lucent Technologies merged six years ago, the combined company was supposed to dominate telecom infrastructure. Its portfolio spanned both the wireline and wireless markets from optical networking to IP routing to 4G base stations. But the last half decade hasn’t been kind to telecom equipment makers and even less so to Alcatel-Lucent. The company has struggled financially, and it’s lost competitive ground both to traditional rivals like Sweden’s Ericsson and to more recent challengers from Asia like Huawei.

On the wireless side, Alcatel-Lucent plowed its resources into LTE. It built an innovative new radio architecture called lightRadio, and focused on landing early key contracts. At first that strategy seemed to be succeeding. Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint awarded the company major portions of their massive LTE contracts, but the deals began to peter out after those initial big wins. The vendor was left out of big European deals even in its home country of France.

Image courtesy of matthi / Shutterstock.com

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Given the kind of hopes and dreams — in many cases, vastly over-inflated ones — that were riding on Facebook’s initial public offering, it’s probably not surprising that the company and its young CEO would be getting a storm of criticism after the fact. Based in part on its massive valuation in private markets such as SecondMarket, Facebook was expected to go public with a market value of $100 billion or more, and many were hoping it would climb skyward from there. How could it not, with close to a billion users, and engagement rates that are off the charts?

Is Zuckerberg really “in over his hoodie?”

As it turned out, of course, that $100 billion was a pie-in-the-sky target, and Facebook stumbled out of the gate and has been falling ever since — at less than $20, the shares are almost 50 percent lower than they were when the company first went public. The skepticism dial was turned up even further when the company came out with its first quarterly report as a public entity, and many analysts saw a less-than-encouraging picture: a company with problems in mobile — which everyone seems to agree is the future of content — and some underwhelming estimates about future performance.

Within days of the earnings report, there were calls for Zuckerberg to step aside: one of the first came from Reuters blogger John Abell, who wrote a post stating: “Facebook needs a new CEO”. Abell said that Zuckerberg might be a visionary, but that’s not what Facebook needs right now:

“He needs to get out of the way –- not because we can judge him a disaster based on a single’s earnings period, but because he isn’t playing to his strength… Facebook needs its spiritual leader and chief innovator in a hoodie. But it doesn’t need him as CEO, placating investors in a collared shirt. There are plenty of people who could manage the Facebook business.”

Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy responded to Abell with a fairly venomous post, in which she argued that Abell simply didn’t know what he was talking about. It is well known, she argued, that “founder CEOs unequivocally have the most success, and the general school of thought in the Valley [is] that you are almost always better off not ousting a founder, even if that founder is doing a horrible job” (Andreessen Horowitz, a leading example of the new breed of SV venture funds, has written about why it believes founding CEOs are almost always better). Lacy also noted, quite rightly, that Zuckerberg has helped build a $70-billion-dollar corporation, and she pointed to perhaps the most egregious case of a flawed “anyone could run that business” approach — namely Yahoo.

Not every founder is Steve Jobs — some are Jerry Yang

There’s no question that the revolving door at Yahoo is a classic case of mismanagement writ large. But one of the CEOs through that door was the company’s co-founder Jerry Yang, and he had even less success in turning Yahoo around than anyone else — which helps to make the somewhat obvious point that not everyone can be Steve Jobs, returning to save their company and transforming it into a stock-market superstar. And yet, supporters of the founder-as-CEO model seem to believe that the odds of such an outcome are higher with the founder than with someone else. That’s in part why there was so much positive response to Larry Page returning to the CEO spot at Google (although the benefits of that move are still debatable).

Certainly there are plenty of companies that were arguably mismanaged after either being acquired or having the CEO forced out, a list that would probably include MySpace and AOL. And there are companies where having a visionary at the top has clearly helped — such as Amazon with Jeff Bezos. But there are also companies where having a founder remain has caused more problems than it solves, and Research In Motion is arguably one prominent example.

Insiders and investor alike talk about how Jim Balsillie and Michael Lazaridis made sense as co-CEOs for a time at RIM, but eventually their commitment to a certain vision changed from a benefit to a gigantic flaw. The result? Billions of dollars in market value destroyed almost overnight.

To take a smaller example, Twitter swapped out co-founder Evan Williams and replaced him with Dick Costolo, someone with no personal stake in the early vision of the network. Has that been a good thing or a bad thing? It has certainly changed the orientation of the company towards revenue-generating models like advertising — a move that appears to be driven primarily by a desire to justify the company’s alleged market value. Would it have been better to stick with a founder as CEO? And if it wasn’t better for Twitter, then why is it better for Facebook?

To a large extent, of course, all of this discussion is moot: thanks in part to Silicon Valley’s belief in the power of the founder as CEO, Mark Zuckerberg controls the fate of the company in a way that few others do, even Google’s co-founders. Not only does he control a majority of the stock through multiple-voting shares and proxy agreements, but he also controls the board of directors — the same board that would have to act in order to replace him as CEO. For better or worse, Facebook has become the ultimate test of the founder-as-CEO mythos. Will it become an Apple-style success story or a RIM-style cautionary tale?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jason McElweenie

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Philipp Humm is out at T-Mobile, and we don’t know why. Maybe he really was planning to leave all along, as he claimed in an internal memo. Maybe he’s being forced out by parent company Deutsche Telekom for the failure of the AT&T-Mo merger. Or maybe he was brought on board in 2010 for the sole reason of selling the U.S. subsidiary and now that a sale is longer feasible, he’s moving on to the next project.

Whatever the reason, the move is sudden, and T-Mobile finds itself looking for a new chief executive. We have some unsolicited advice for whomever that replacement will be, as well as acting CEO Jim Ailing: Don’t mess with Humm’s work.

T-Mobile may be suffering at the hands of its much larger rivals Verizon Wireless and AT&T, but the last thing T-Mobile needs right now is the strategy shake up that a new CEO invariably brings. After the failed merger with AT&T, Humm and his team put together a solid plan to become a competitive force in the market. Here are the reasons why we think T-Mo is on the right track:

• It has the most competitively priced data voice and data plans in the market. It may not have true unlimited data like Sprint, but it has a lot more options for cheap and plentiful smartphone bandwidth. It’s also challenging the long ingrained subsidy model in the U.S., offering customers lower rates if they pay for their devices up front. As our data consumption continues to grow, those innovative pricing policies will become a key differentiator from Ma Bell and Big Red.

• It amazingly has pulled an LTE network out of thin airwaves. T-Mobile has always been spectrum poor, but CTO Neville Ray has shown tremendous resourcefulness with the meager cards he has been dealt. By refarming T-Mobile’s GSM capacity and playing musical chairs with its networks, Ray not only managed to eke out an LTE network but even found room to expand its existing HSPA+ network.

• That future LTE network may not be as big nor as robust as its competitors, but T-Mobile is taking all the necessary steps to ensure it will become one. It wrenched the spectrum it needed from AT&T to complete its LTE network on the West Coast, and it negotiated a very shrewd pact with Verizon for the airwaves its needs on the East Coast. That deal may have been cynical, given its condemnation of Verizon in the recent past, but T-Mobile is a business. If T-Mobile is going to compete with the big operators it will need to make the same Machiavellian choices as the big operators.

• T-Mobile is set to get the iPhone. The same network reconfiguration that will give it LTE will also plant its HSPA+ network in the terra firma of the PCS band. That means any iPhone that works on AT&T’s network will work on T-Mobile. As I have written before, Apple isn’t stupid. When T-Mobile is iPhone-ready, Apple will jump at the chance to offer it on its network.

• Instead of fighting off the growing cadre of mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), T-Mobile has started to embrace them. Last year T-Mobile opened its data networks to the resellers, and since then Straight Talk, Simple Mobile, GSM Nation and many others have all signed up, giving T-Mobile a lucrative source of revenue.

Wireless industry analyst Chetan Sharma believes T-Mobile is still weak when it comes to selling to businesses and vertical industries like health care. Sharma also thinks it needs to come up with more services like its Bobsled VoIP calling service in order to fend off the growing threat of over-the-top service providers. But for the most part, T-Mobile is on the right track, Sharma told me in an email:

T-Mobile has done a pretty good job on the network front under the leadership of Neville Ray. They upgraded their backhaul to Fiber and moved rapidly on HSPA+. Even the LTE deal was put together in record time. Normally, these things can take many quarters. Their marketing is always edgy. They put the top 3 operators on the back foot with their 4G marketing (rightly or wrongly). They are clearly positioned well to be a good value competitor. At this point, addition of iPhone is not going to tilt the scales too favorably. It is useful to prevent churn but expect no significant defections.

Of course, as Sharma implies, this wasn’t all Humm’s doing. Humm ran the company, but the groundwork for many of these initiatives was laid before he arrived in May 2010. As David Beren of TMoNews suggested on Twitter, T-Mobile may have accomplished what it has despite Humm’s presence:

I believe he was brought in to prep the company for sale, which left the company distracted from strategies that should have launched a long time ago . . . [While] the “challenger strategy” is great, [it] should have happened 18 months ago.

Regardless of whether T-Mobile’s current aggressive strategy is Humm’s legacy or the work of his team, we think it’s a good plan. T-Mobile’s next CEO should give it a chance to work.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Shawn Hempel

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(Context: I’m a 31-year-old CEO of  a tech and creative agency, iStrategyLabs. This year will be my fourth trip to SXSW.)

1. Ask everyone what they’re up to before you pimp what you’re doing. Nobody cares about your crappy startup (even if it’s not crappy). People care about what they’re doing and what their problems are. If you can help them with what they’re doing, or solve their problem, then they’re instantly going to love you.
2. Don’t sell too hard or you’ll just look like a schmuck. Although SXSW is only a few days long, it is both a sprint and a marathon. I’ve done deals with people two or three years after first meeting them at SXSW. Those have been the biggest and best deals of my career, and they didn’t come about because I went to SXSW to sell something.
3. Love first. Sales second. There’s plenty of time to sell after SXSW. But there’s a limited amount of time during the conference to meet lots of people and make them absolutely love you. Focus on getting people to fall in love with you, and everything else will follow.
4. Working a room of 100 amazing people is better than hitting 10 events filled with less-than-awesome people. Party and panel hopping is great. I do a ton of it, but I only leave if the people aren’t awesome. If they are amazing, I stay there as long as it makes sense. Amazing is subjective. You need to figure this out for yourself. For me, amazing people are those who teach me something new. If I’m not learning, I move on.
5. Shticks are valuable social devices. Have at least one. You need something to talk about other than your startup. For example, this year GE hired us to hack one of their appliances so that people have to use Foursquare check-ins to get the beer GE put inside. That’s cool. I can pimp that to everyone, and tell them to go check in to get free beer. They don’t care about “iStrategyLabs’s new Social Machines offering that does blah blah blah.” They want free beer. They’ll tell other people about the cool way I hooked them up with free beer. A few months from now, this will lead to someone hiring me and paying me $200,000. All because they remembered the free beer.
6. Don’t linger. Lingerers are lame. Absolutely never sweat the web-celebs. Even if you see Shira Lazar, Pete Cashmore, Robert Scoble and Kevin Rose hanging out at Six Lounge, don’t get all up in their grill like a high school basket ball fan meeting LeBron James. Talk to people like they’re just as influential as you are and that they’re normal humans. Say hello. Try to make a real connection. And move on — quickly.
7. Forget about balancing work and fun. Eat this festival alive, and come out the other end ready to step up your game. If you’re at SXSW, your work is probably really fun. If you work isn’t fun — then you should be looking for a new job at SXSW.
8. Guys: Don’t be a non-stop hit-on-cute-tech-and-Texas-girls machine. That’s the creepiest thing you could do. It could damage your personal brand and your company, and you might miss an opportunity to connect meaningfully with the opposite sex – cutting off the possibility of a great business outcome or long-term friendship.
9. Gals: Avoid the mechanical bull at the Rebels Honky-Tonk. Seriously. You don’t want to end up tagged on Facebook by colleagues when you’re half (or fully drunk) and potentially exposing yourself. I’ve seen this happen.
10. Geeks of all stripes: Don’t trust anyone who says SXSW sucks. That’s like saying chocolate doesn’t taste good or that sunsets are ugly. It’s just crazy talk. Your SXSW lanyard is your golden ticket to personal and professional nerd heaven. Enjoy it!

Peter Corbett is the CEO of iStrategyLabs, a creative social agency. He tweets at @corbett3000.

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The ongoing study, known as the Executive Time Use Project, was carried out by scholars from the London School of Economics and Harvard Business School, and some of its findings were reported recently in the Wall Street Journal. The team of researchers conducted in-depth analyses of the daily schedules of 500 CEOs from companies of various sizes and a variety of countries to find out exactly what they do all day.

As you’d expect, meetings were a big time-suck for executives, with one sample of 65 CEOs spending 18 hours of their 55-hour workweek tied up in meetings. But what you might be more surprised to learn was how many of those meetings were conducted virtually. Forget images out of Mad Men of key players gathered around a conference table hashing out weighty matters, the WSJ says CEOs’ meetings are “often conducted virtually in global companies.” The article offers Rory Cowan, CEO of 4,500-strong technology services company Lionbridge Technologies, as an example:

Instead of spending a lot of time in long face-to-face meetings, however, Mr. Cowan spends more time “doing frequent iterative touches,” either in person or via text messages, instant messaging and video chat—sometimes with “four or five windows open concurrently.” As a result, his meetings rarely last more than 15 minutes, he says.

As Victoria Pynchon writes in a thoughtful consideration of the findings for Forbes, this study “tells us that CEOs’ lives are looking a lot like those of working mothers who are telecommuting, taking advantage of flex-time schedules and conducting much of their business virtually.” And Pynchon feels the decline in the importance of “face time” can only be a good thing for business culture as an understanding of and tolerance for more flexible ways of working seeps down the ranks. “Flex-time will no longer be associated primarily with working mothers nor considered a sign of a mother’s lack of focus on and dedication to her work,” she concludes.

Do you agree that CEOs’ increasing use of flextime and virtual communication tools is likely to change attitudes further down their organization?

Image courtesy of Flickr user DanDeChiaro.

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It’s kind of amazing to consider how passé the iPod, the gadget that defined a decade of music, has become at Apple: the iPhone is the now the halo maker, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook. In comments before the financial community at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, Cook held forth on a number of mobile-related topics, including the debate over whether the iPad is a PC.

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Cook did talk at great length about his view of the potential growth opportunities for the iPhone, iPad and Mac. But just as important for investors who want a clue as to where the company is going in Steve Jobs’ absence, Cook also opened up a bit on how he plans to make his own mark on Apple. He is very obviously not Steve Jobs, something he’s been repeatedly reminded of by the press and Wall Street since it first became apparent he would likely take the reins from Jobs permanently. And while it’s clear he has learned from Jobs in many ways — peppering his sentences with words like “amazing” and “incredible” and espousing his belief in the supremacy of Apple’s vision and extreme focus — Cook is passionate about Apple in his own way.

One of the things he takes very seriously is his role as the caretaker of Apple and what Jobs created. He said:

Apple is this unique company, unique culture that you can’t replicate. And I’m not going to witness or prevent the slow undoing of it — because I believe in it so deeply. Steve drilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great products and we should stay extremely focused on a few things rather than so many that we did nothing well. And we should only go into markets where we can make  a significant contribution to society, not just sell a lot of products. Along with keeping excellent as an expectation of everything at Apple, these are the things I focus on.

Sure, we all think of Cook as the spreadsheet-and-numbers nerd, but he is becoming a salesman too: During the Q&A session, he recommended at least three times that listeners go buy an Apple TV.

It’s not a secret that the things that made Jobs tick are not the same for his successor. And Cook, who is a notoriously private person, is starting to show what those things are to company outsiders. For him, it seems, rather than inventing the future or ruminating on big ideas, the big reward for him is winning customers and putting products in people’s hands. “There’s no better thrill than to look at an audience and see people using iPods or iPads,” he said. “These are the things that bring a smile to my face, and there is no substitute for that.”

Cook’s view on cash

One of the ways Cook may turn out to be different from Jobs is what happens under his watch with the company’s cash and liquid assets. Jobs was very adamant that no dividend or share buybacks or large acquisitions be made, in order to keep Apple totally out of debt and independent should the company hit rough financial waters. Cook has signaled he’s not nearly as extreme in his position — several times, including on Tuesday, he has reminded investors he is “not religious” about keeping cash or not.

So what is his attitude? He cleared up any ideas that Apple just sits on its pile of cash (or goes swimming in a lake of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck). He noted that the company has spent “billions” on its supply chain, acquisitions, retail operations and company infrastructure:

Yes, we still have a lot. I guess I’m saying we’re judicious. We’re deliberate. We spend our money like it’s our last penny. And I think shareholders want us to do that. They don’t want us to act like we’re rich. We’ve never felt that way — that may sound bizarre, but it’s the truth.

Cook trotted out the same line the company has been using about its cash in the last several years, that the board is “in active discussions” about what to do with it. But this time he admitted that there is more focus than ever “because the balance has risen.” And he made another admission:

We have more cash than we need to run the business on a daily basis. 

With that he asked for patience while the board decides what to do. While it’s not terribly likely he will get it, how he’s handling the issue does demonstrate Cook’s style. He’s very much a product of the Apple/Jobs way, but he’s looking ahead and is not opposed to at least thinking a little differently about the way things have always been done.

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