Jack Smith, CEO of General Motors, and Andrew Grove, President and CEO of Intel Corp., kick off this year's "Industry Leaders in Technology and Management" lecture series in September, each with 90-minute presentations open to the MIT community.
The lecture series is co-sponsored by the School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management and hosted by the Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development.
Mr. Smith will highlight his company's historical strengths and discuss its latest emphasis on globalization with his talk entitled "Preparing for the Millennium-Go Global or Go Bust" on Thursday, Sept. 19 at 2:30pm in Kresge Auditorium.
According to Mr. Smith, who headed international operations for GM from 1988 to 1992, global thinking and management are critical for the survival of the auto industry as it moves to capture emerging markets. GM can no longer afford duplicate processes from country to country, he said.
Taking an historical approach, Mr. Smith will stress his company's strengths in overcoming market declines over the past 80 years and discuss the innovations brought about in the 1920s by then-president Alfred P. Sloan, who complemented the concept of mass production by implementing more efficient patterns of management and placed GM above Ford as the world's leading automobile manufacturer.
Dr. Grove's presentation on Wednesday, Sept. 25 at 4pm in the Tang Center's Wong Auditorium (Building E51) is entitled "Exploiting the Crisis Points Challenging Every Company and Career." It reflects his recent book, Only the Paranoid Survive, in which he recounts Intel's strategy in capitalizing on what he calls strategic inflection points, or SIPs. SIPs are full-scale changes in the way business is conducted, brought about suddenly by such factors as new technology, new competitors or new approaches to business. SIPs come with little warning, Dr. Grove said, and they require companies to be in a constant state of awareness.
Upon introducing the first microprocessor in 1971, Intel has since captured much of the PC market, supplying 75 percent of the computer industry today with chips, boards, systems and software.
Mr. Smith joined GM at its Framingham plant in 1961 after receiving a business degree from the University of Massachusetts and an MBA from Boston University. Dr. Grove graduated in chemical engineering from the City College of New York and received the PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. In July 1968, Dr. Grove participated in the founding of Intel Corp.
The "Industry Leaders in Technology and Management" lecture series brings CEOs from leading corporations to MIT. Seating is limited to a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, call x3-9756 or refer to the CTPID homepage at
A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on September 11, 1996.
