I hate to say it, but a leader who lives in fear of this is what Intel needed to stay ahead. Andy Grove believed and lived in fear of monopoly power ... since then CEOs at Intel have lacked that conviction.

"Only the paranoid survives" - Andy Grove

And put bean counters in charge.

Ah yes HP 1999 calling there…

This trope needs to be put to rest. Brian Krzanich was a tech insider and Intel fared poorly under him. The current CEO is as much of an insider, and it's still doing poorly under him.

An exception to the trope doesn't "put it to rest," except of course for that exception.

For Intel the interim CFO made CEO was actually executing a strategy that might have worked. I was pretty sure Gelsinger would be a catastrophic mistake because he wasn't a fabrication guy (but maybe they couldn't hire one?) and I'm sad to see this playing out. His strategy depends on one difficult to impossible, and one impossible thing: regain the ability to move to new nodes on a very fast time scale and change the corporate culture to accommodate foundry customers without buying such a company.

By now without having heard of mass firings of incompetent managers but plenty of reports it's still a snake pit or clown show if you prefer, and the latest capex decrease of $4 billion says nothing good. Even if the latter is just that they can't buy the machines they need.

While I'm at it, how well is their 10 nm now Intel 7 node at shipping parts? That was when Intel's decades of bad top level technical management snared their crown jewel.

Fighting complacency is not easy.

While also putting an MBA in charge.