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It is for this performance that our CEO of the Year Selection Committee named Lisa Su Chief Executive<\/em>\u2019s 2024 CEO of the Year. \u201cLisa Su\u2019s leadership in transforming AMD into a global leader in innovation and technology is truly remarkable,\u201d says Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta Air Lines and Chief Executive<\/em>\u2019s 2023 CEO of the Year, who served on this year\u2019s selection committee. \u201cJust as impressive is the fact that she never forgets the people behind the technology\u2014her employees and customers are always front and center. Her values-led approach is exactly the type of leadership we need as we move into an exciting and unprecedented future driven by AI innovation and emerging technology.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, Chief Executive<\/em>\u2019s 2022 CEO of the Year and a member of this year\u2019s selection committee, agrees: \u201cLisa is a pioneering CEO who has transformed AMD into one of the greatest companies of our generation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The AMD Su inherited from then-CEO Rory Read in 2014 was a sad, scared place. The company was born a renegade \u201csecond-sourcer\u201d of electronic components in 1969. Cofounder Jerry Sanders built AMD over decades into one of the largest chip makers in the world, challenging industry-leader Intel on a host of fronts through the 1980s and 1990s. But by the time Su took over, a quarter of the staff had been fired, part of an ugly annual ritual. Server market share for the once-proud firm was just 2 percent. The Austin campus was sold off to help pay the bills (the company leased it back so they had a place to work).<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe person who runs my data center business is a guy named Forrest Norrod right now, and he was at Dell at the time,\u201d says Su. \u201cI remember going to see him, and he would say, \u2018Look, Lisa, we love AMD, but I can\u2019t trust what you say. We really want you to be successful, but we need to be able to count on you.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Still, she\u2019d spent the past two years studying AMD in her SVP post after being recruited to the company from Freescale Semiconductor. To her, AMD wasn\u2019t a sinking ship. She saw\u2014because of her deep engineering expertise\u2014opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThere were very few companies that were working on leading-edge technology, and that\u2019s what I enjoyed. So, coming into the company at that time, I saw lots of great people, great heart. Our customers and partners were always rooting for us, but we just didn\u2019t execute that well, and I thought that was something I could help with.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She embarked on a radical refocusing of AMD, including a big bet on a revolutionary (read: then-experimental and untried) way of putting together processors from smaller \u201cchiplets.\u201d Prior to this approach, you made more powerful microprocessors by\u2014short version here\u2014making bigger and bigger microprocessors, a model that had become unsustainable. Su and her team decided to go for a more modular\u2014and hopefully scalable\u2014way of achieving the same goals by packaging chiplets together. AMD dubbed it their \u201cZen architecture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe old AMD would\u2019ve said, \u2018Well, what\u2019s Intel doing? Let me make sure that I\u2019m doing what they\u2019re doing,\u2019\u201d Su says. \u201cThis AMD said, \u2018Let me do what I think is the right thing, and let\u2019s bet on ourselves.\u2019 If you look today, by the way, all of our competition is doing what we\u2019re doing, which is chiplets.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was among many moves\u2014now near-legendary in her industry\u2014that she made along the way. One was choosing not to dive into furnishing chips for the expanding mobile device market when that seemed a contrarian\u2014and perhaps even foolish\u2014bet. Another was driving through a Texas ice storm to meet personally with the CEO of HP Enterprise to give him her word that they would be able to meet demand if HPE signed a major deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But the turnaround at AMD was really won with years of constant, small improvements while keeping focused on what Su believed to be the biggest opportunities in computing. Among those are AMD\u2019s $49 billion all-stock acquisition of Xilinx, a leader of reprogrammable chips known as FPGAs, in 2022, and announced its intent to purchase data center designer ZT Systems for $4.9 billion, which will give AMD a valuable new beachhead into the exploding market for AI when the deal closes in 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ten years after becoming CEO, Su, a daughter of Taiwanese immigrants and raised in Queens, New York, now improbably leads at the crossroads of two of the most profound forces shaping the world: geopolitical (over the fate of Taiwan) and technological (the rise of artificial intelligence). The chip industry, long the underappreciated foundation of the computer revolution, is now recognized\u2014thanks in large part to Covid-era shortages\u2014as essential to modern life as oil, electricity and water.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It also remains fiercely competitive, where industry titans like AI-focused rival NVIDIA\u2014run by Su\u2019s cousin, Jensen Huang\u2014can grab huge swaths of market share with cunning designs, and where product cycles are as lengthy and complex as drug development, and capital expenses rival those of offshore oil exploration. None of which appears to faze or tire Su.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sitting in a nondescript conference room in Austin, a decade into her remarkable tenure, she still sees more road ahead than behind. And she seems genuinely excited to meet it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe advent of ChatGPT woke everyone up to, \u2018Oh wow, this technology is something,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cAnd we\u2019re still in the very early innings of it.\u201d The following interview, conducted in June 2024, was edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I saw was that we had a lot of the pieces, they just weren\u2019t quite put together correctly. We were always trying to be somebody else. We were, \u201cHow do I compete in this area or that area?\u201d We weren\u2019t as focused as we needed to be. So, those first two years, I learned a ton about the company. I actually learned that at that time more than 9 percent of our revenue was in the PC market\u2014and I learned, \u201cMan, the PC market is actually a hard market.\u201d But all the foundational pieces were there. We had to make some important strategic choices: What do we want to be best at? Our goal was to build the best high-performance computing technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\u2019re right, it was not the obvious strategy. However, we had a vision. I had a vision. The vision was: We\u2019re not the cheaper guy either, right? That\u2019s not a long-term, sustainable business strategy. You\u2019re always going to be number two. So, we had to say, \u201cWhat do we think we could be best at?\u201d In our industry, there are also inflection points that are there, and what I saw was an opportunity. If you take a look at the five-year arc, not the two-year arc, Moore\u2019s law was changing. The idea that you had to do manufacturing and design together actually was changing. How much you could get out of just manufacturing was also changing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our bet was, \u201cLook, we\u2019re going to do clean-sheet design.\u201d We could have kept polishing something, but it wasn\u2019t the right starting point. So let\u2019s start from scratch with a new design. Let\u2019s convince the board that it will take us probably five years and three generations to become best-in-class. We would show proof points along the way, so it wasn\u2019t, like, \u201cTrust me,\u201d but it was, \u201cThis is how we\u2019re going to rebuild a roadmap to leadership.\u201d We took that plan, and we sold it to the leadership team. We sold it to the board, and then we sold it to our customers, and then we had to sell it to our shareholders. But the idea of working on something that is bleeding-edge, best in class, I mean, who doesn\u2019t want to do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s right. By the way, you\u2019re not going to keep everybody. Look, why did our leaders want to be on this sort of journey? Because it\u2019s exactly that. You want to be ambitious. You want to build the best. You don\u2019t want to build the second best. Getting in front of 8,000 engineers and saying, \u201cHey, our strategy is to be the second-best,\u201d that\u2019s hard. You say, \u201cLook, we\u2019re going to be ambitious. We\u2019re going to make some bold bets. There are some things we\u2019re not going to do.\u201d One of the questions that my board asked me quite clearly was, \u201cLook, maybe you should be in the low-power business. Build chips for mobile phones.\u201d Everybody wanted a new tablet or a new phone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I said, \u201cNo, no, no, we\u2019re not those types of people. That\u2019s not fundamentally what we\u2019re going to be good at. We\u2019re going to be good at building the biggest computers.\u201d And at that point in time, we had less than 1 percent market share, so to say that we\u2019re going to build the biggest computers was kind of a leap. But engineering-wise, we could see how we could do that. We could see all the pieces; it just would take time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Great question. When I became COO, it became time to think through if I had the opportunity to be CEO, what that would look like. I realized we needed more systems talent; we\u2019re a very heavy engineering company. So if I think about, \u201cYes, I\u2019m an engineer,\u201d my right-hand person is Mark Papermaster. He\u2019s been on this journey with me as CTO. Then, we had to get some other leaders for our business, and I mentioned Forrest Norrod, who had a great background at Dell. He had been in the silicon business, and he also was a customer of ours, so he knew us from afar. Convincing him to join and run our data center business was one of my first things to do as COO and then CEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was looking for people who really loved the challenge. If you were looking for the most stable job in the industry, AMD was not it. We were looking for someone who wanted to do something extraordinary. One of the things that we would say was, \u201cHaving less than 1 percent market share is actually a blessing, because, frankly, there are no expectations. Nobody expects that we\u2019re going to be able to do this.\u201d It allows you to take, let\u2019s call it bolder risks and have a vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we needed to do was make sure that we had the financial capability to go through that. Some people would say at that point in time that the company was not as financially sound as it should be. We had a good amount of debt, and we were losing a good amount of money in those early years. I had a great CFO as well, Devinder Kumar. Basically his job was to make sure that we had the time to do what we needed to do. That\u2019s how we thought about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s right, play to win. We\u2019re here, we went all-in on a very novel technology, the Zen architecture and what we call chiplets. It hadn\u2019t been done in our industry, and I remember spending time with the technical team when they came to me with this recommendation, and I\u2019m, like, \u201cOkay. Why do we think this is going to work? It hasn\u2019t been done before. There\u2019s a reason it hasn\u2019t been done before. Why do we think it\u2019s going to work?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n We believed that because of Moore\u2019s law slowing down, this was the time that going to chiplets would work, and we were going to try it. In the beginning, our competition said, \u201cThey\u2019re gluing chips together,\u201d and we\u2019re like, \u201cNo, we\u2019re not. We\u2019re building chips in a smarter way because it\u2019ll allow you to build bigger and bigger things.\u201d So Zen 1 was very good. I think we surprised people. But even with Zen 1, we were still single-digit market share in the server business. But my plan to the board was always that we needed three generations, Zen 1, Zen 2 and Zen 3. By the time we\u2019re Zen 3, we\u2019re going to be the best in the industry, and that\u2019s the exact plan we told the board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As it turned out, we were probably a little bit ahead of our plan. So by the time we got to Zen 2, it was already, I would say, quite ahead in terms of leading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best group of people that I like to have around me are the experts in the field. So Mark is always there with me, Forrest is always there with me, but we have some corporate fellows who are brilliant, and they spend time thinking about ideas. They\u2019re not always right, by the way. We\u2019ve had things fail as well, but they bring a set of ideas for what our roadmap should be. Our roadmap process is something that I, to this day, spend a lot of time on. We debate: \u201cHey, is that too aggressive? Is that too conservative?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The magic in our business is you have to have the right amount of risk-reward, because you\u2019re not always going to be right. There are some decisions where, boy, you know, that didn\u2019t quite turn out the way I wanted, but you have to make enough right. Particularly on these larger decisions, we spend a lot of time debating among ourselves and then also ensuring that whatever we build has to be leadership. It\u2019s back to that ambition aspect of it. We\u2019re not building to be second-best. Now, it might take us a while. You can\u2019t go from not-good to good immediately, but we\u2019re not building to be second-best.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yeah, we just have to spend triple-digit millions on most things. I\u2019m a very data-driven person, so I like to understand the data. People will send me lots and lots of presentations of details, and I like to go through all that. But what I also like to do is to talk to the people who are doing the work. I like to believe that, as a leader, one of the things that is most important is always knowing and getting a broad spectrum of input. As much as I love my staff, they\u2019re only one input. Talking directly to the engineers, talking directly to customers, sometimes talking with people in the labs. I love going into the labs and just saying, \u201cHey, how\u2019s it going?\u201d Because you don\u2019t always hear everything sitting in your office, and that\u2019s been very helpful for me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I learn in every forum that I\u2019m in. I learn in internal discussions just what\u2019s going on. I learn talking to the guy in the lab. I spend a lot of time with our top customers. Some CEOs are like, \u201cWell, I\u2019m only going to talk to the CEO.\u201d I think, \u201cAre you kidding me? There\u2019s so much information.\u201d Of course, I love having relationships with my peer CEOs, but I love having relationships with the head of engineering or the head of sales and our customers, because I learn what is on their minds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I learn a lot from reading. I read a lot about what people say about us. I don\u2019t always like what they say. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I don\u2019t, but it gives me a perspective of how people are viewing our products. I\u2019m often asking, \u201cHey, why are those people complaining about that?\u201d We can always decide whether we\u2019re going to fix that particular problem or not, but this real-time feedback is really important. I always come back and say, \u201cHey, this is what I did this week. I spent time with this CEO, and I was at this CIO forum, and I read this in blah, blah, blah. What are we doing about these things?\u201d So, it\u2019s a very active process of learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have a standing staff meeting, one hour, every week. No matter where we are, no matter where I am, I try to hold onto that. It\u2019s always on a Friday, and it\u2019s an opportunity to communicate. When you\u2019re running a global company like what we\u2019re all running, it\u2019s very easy to get out of sync. And in our business, we can\u2019t be out of sync, so it is very informal from the standpoint of no slides, no nothing. We just talk. I spend the first 15 minutes talking about what\u2019s on my mind, and then everyone goes around the room. It\u2019s a roundtable conversation. That\u2019s an important opportunity for me to stay connected to the staff and make sure that our priorities are always aligned, and that if something comes up, everybody knows that, \u201cHey, this is important to Lisa, so let\u2019s make sure that it\u2019s taken care of.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, I actually spend a good amount of time still doing engineering reviews, roadmap reviews. Those are not necessarily weekly or anything. They might be a monthly type of thing, but I really like understanding directly from the people who are doing the work, \u201cHow is it going? What are you guys worried about?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe what makes it different as a Lisa Su meeting is: I love pre-reads. Not like, five days in advance or something. But give me a pre-read 24 hours in advance so that we know what the topics are and then we can focus the conversation on what the problem areas are and not just regular updates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we\u2019ve done well is we do have a learning culture as a company. We instituted something called the Next 5 Percent, and I remember how this started. I was actually in Europe doing a town hall, and it was probably after a not-so-good quarter, and somebody asked me, \u201cWhat do you want the company to be thinking about?\u201d I said, \u201cLook, what I want the company to be thinking about is, no matter what we do, we have to learn from it. There is a next 5 percent. Every situation that we\u2019re in, we can make it at least 5 percent better. If we think about that, it helps us drive that learning culture.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we would celebrate. We would ask, \u201cWhat\u2019s your next 5 percent?\u201d Because, I mean, everyone thinks that they\u2019re working 100 percent. They are working 100 percent, no doubt, but I believe great leaders get 120 percent out of their teams. Some of that comes from focus, some of that comes from heart, some of that comes from just plain doing things more efficiently. This idea of the Next 5 Percent, for me, was, \u201cLet\u2019s make sure we\u2019re doing lessons learned after every major project.\u201d No matter how good it was, it can always be better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, we\u2019re in a rhythm where everyone feels it\u2019s normal for us to talk about, \u201cWhat\u2019s our next 5 percent? How do we improve upon the last thing that we did?\u201d Even when things go really well, we\u2019ve learned something, and we do it regularly, whether it\u2019s a product, a marketing program, a comms event or a customer roundtable. How could we just make that a little bit better the next time we do it? That\u2019s an important aspect of our culture that I believe we\u2019ve gotten ingrained in the culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was lucky I spent the majority of my early career at IBM, and I was there for 13, 14 years. I do believe that leaders are trained. They\u2019re not born. I was trained. I went through first-level management school, second-level management school, director school, VP school, and that left an impression upon me, because I felt like the company was investing in me through each of these junctures. In every two-day class that you attended, it\u2019s not like every minute was perfect or useful, but you definitely picked up nuggets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I came to AMD, and it\u2019s not just AMD, frankly, it\u2019s many other smaller firms that don\u2019t necessarily have an ingrained talent system, there just wasn\u2019t that. Actually, it was the opposite. Leaders wanted to hold onto their best people. Nobody wanted their best person to go somewhere else. What had really helped me at IBM is that every two years I did a different job, so I got a lot of experience that way. So here, we implemented a process where we would review talent with my staff basically every month. The purpose of the talent review was, \u201cHey, who are our top people? Who\u2019s potentially ready for another role? What are the other roles that are really important roles?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n My thought process is, \u201cLook, put your best people in your toughest and most important problems, and if they succeed, then wonderful. They\u2019ve learned a lot, and we\u2019ve now grown a new leader.\u201d That\u2019s how I felt I had those opportunities. That\u2019s a fairly active process for us. I review any of the larger director or vice president jobs with my staff on a monthly basis. And then, for the women, particularly women in engineering, there are just not enough. As you go through the pipeline, they get fewer and fewer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So we have a new managers class. We have a new directors class. We\u2019ve recently put together something [for] advancing women in tech, where we\u2019re developing these women such that they have better opportunities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n At the end of the day, it has to be the right person so we\u2019re not putting people in places where they\u2019re not successful, because that\u2019s not helpful. But you have to take some risk on people, and you have to give talented folks really tough jobs and let them succeed. Most of the time, they will, with enough help.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We do\u2014in every organization. In every one of our major organizations, we run an organizational HR map, and we say, \u201cHey, these are the important roles. These are important people. Let\u2019s make sure that the important people are in the important roles.\u201d And then we\u2019re very active on, \u201cWho are the successors, and how do we develop successors?\u201d All that being said though, you never have enough talent. I don\u2019t want to make it sound like everything is perfect, but I would say that it\u2019s an active conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I have learned is that the more direct you can make the feedback, the better it is. The major lessons that I\u2019ve learned are when I\u2019ve screwed up the most. When someone is actually good enough to actually tell me when I\u2019ve screwed up, that\u2019s when you learn, and so that\u2019s what I try to practice. I say \u201ctry to practice\u201d because nobody really wants feedback. Feedback is always kind of painful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Feedback is a gift, but nobody really wants it. That was, like, my first 360. I\u2019m like, \u201cSeriously? This is what people said? I mean, really?\u201d But then, once you get rid of that little sting, you\u2019re like, \u201cYou know what? What have I learned from this?\u201d So, having leaders recognize that perception is reality helps just make small adjustments. And some are better at it than others. Some people do take feedback, some people don\u2019t take feedback. The best people really take feedback well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, I have to say that it\u2019s really quite amazing that it\u2019s now recognized that semiconductors in chips are so essential to everything that we do. Certainly pre-pandemic, five-plus years ago, I was in semiconductors so I thought they were important, but if you had the casual conversation with even very senior leaders, they would say, \u201cChips? Who cares what\u2019s underneath?\u201d So, I do think that we are in a very essential place right now, which is great. My comment is, these technology arcs are usually not one, two or three years, they\u2019re usually five to 10 years, if not more. This AI opportunity is perhaps the largest inflection that I\u2019ve seen in my career.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The reason is that we now have a technology that everyone should be able to use. We\u2019ve made generative AI so easy that you can actually talk to your computer, and your computer will give you intelligence back. That\u2019s the thing that\u2019s changed over the past 18 months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of my large internal priorities is, how do I apply AI through everything that we do at AMD? Now, I build chips for AI. I\u2019d like to sell lots of chips for AI, but I\u2019m also a big user of AI because I believe AI can fundamentally build chips faster, build chips more reliably, build chips at lower cost and at higher quality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because it\u2019s not done yet. If this were 10 years later, we could say, \u201cHey, here you go. This is what you need to do, step one, two, three, four, five.\u201d But today, we\u2019re still in the infancy. In the infancy, there is a lot of trial and error. We\u2019re probably running 150 pilots across the company. In any given function there\u2019s, \u201cHow do you use AI to accelerate software development? How do you use AI to accelerate test plants? How do you use AI to help you track quality issues?\u201d Every one of these has a different proof of concept, and so it does require tone from the top, which is change management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Here, it does get a little tricky because people are like, \u201cWell, does that mean you don\u2019t need so many engineers anymore?\u201d My comment is, \u201cNo, actually.\u201d One of the things I view as important is it\u2019s not that we don\u2019t need so many engineers. It\u2019s like, I want to build more products. So if I could cut my time to market by six months, or if I could reduce the number of engineers that I need for a given product by 30 percent, then I can build 30 percent more products. There\u2019s a lot in terms of marketing, sales and other things, too. So yeah, it is a transformation that all of us need to go through as CEOs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s right. We have leaders who are leading various aspects of it. They actually report to me in terms of they give me progress reports of, \u201cWhat are we doing in hardware? What are we doing in software? Which pilots are approved to go into production? Which pilots have we not?\u201d We\u2019re doing a fairly rigorous return on investment. By implementing this AI, how many resources are we going to save, or how much time are we going to save? Very simply, if we can save, whatever, an hour a day or two hours a day of an engineer\u2019s time, that\u2019s huge once you multiply it by the number of things that people have to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The way I think about it is, AMD has been investing in AI for many, many years. This is not a new thing. We didn\u2019t just decide 18 months ago we were going to invest in AI. It was, the strategy was actually very clear that our first job was general purpose computing, and that\u2019s what we did with the Zen architecture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Then, we also believe that you need different types of computing for all the jobs or workloads that there are in the world, and so you need CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs. That was our acquisition of Xilinx. I\u2019ve always believed that you need all of these components, and our investments in this area have really accelerated as AI has become such a bigger platform. My conversation about AI is: We\u2019re still in the early innings. There is no one size fits all when it comes to computing. Depending on what you\u2019re trying to do, you\u2019re going to need different technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I believe we have all the pieces, and I also believe that we have a strategy around working deeply with our partners and customers to accomplish what they\u2019re trying to accomplish. We are an enabler of the largest tech companies in the world. If you think about our deep partnerships with Microsoft, Meta, Oracle, Amazon or Salesforce, or all of these folks, they all require bleeding-edge technology, and they don\u2019t all need the same thing. Having the ability to really drive that forefront and also do it in a very collaborative way is one of our strengths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I love it because I learn so much from every customer interaction. The way I like to say it is, \u201cLook, if you\u2019re going to trust me or trust AMD with your most important projects, then I\u2019d like you to know there\u2019s a face behind the company.\u201d So for our largest customers, I want you to trust me. I want you to be betting your business on AMD technology. So yeah, I do spend a lot of time with our largest customers, and part of it is also laying out a vision for what to expect from us. In that particular conversation with Antonio [Neri] at HP, I was telling him that: \u201cI\u2019m going to be stopping my old roadmap because it\u2019s not good enough, and I\u2019m building a new roadmap. Please trust me. It will take me a few years, but this is the right thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Antonio, to his credit, at the time said, \u201cOkay, Lisa, I trust you. I will support this if you deliver on your commitments.\u201d So, to me, my word is everything. If I\u2019m going to commit to doing something, I am going to get it done, and we\u2019re going to make sure that all the resources are behind that. That\u2019s the role of the CEO. When someone is making a very large decision and they\u2019re taking a risk on you, you need to be there and make sure that they know that there\u2019s a person. It\u2019s on me, and if I can\u2019t get it done, I will tell you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Like I said, relationships are important at every level, but when you\u2019re making large bets, especially in an industry as concentrated as ours, I like being the chief salesperson. It\u2019s super fun. Now, that being the case, we have a lot of great salespeople, but it is fun. It\u2019s fun because you can see projects from the beginning to the end, and at the end you gain so much respect, right? So one of the things I\u2019m most proud of is, back in the older days, like in the 2014, 2015 days when we were starting, I got a lot of, \u201cOkay, well, let\u2019s see what you can do.\u201d They were not quite sold. Let\u2019s put it that way. Today, if you look at where we are, we absolutely have a seat at all of the important tables, and we are a trusted partner. That\u2019s where I wanted it to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I\u2019ve had an executive coach through my career at different points in time. There\u2019s tremendous value in getting feedback, and particularly these 360 processes. My first 360 that I did here at AMD, I don\u2019t know, maybe 50 people were interviewed, and it was, like, 60 pages. It was super extensive, but the net of it was I learned something about perception.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When I started, I perhaps took for granted that people knew what my intentions were, and I was much, much more focused on just the business itself. Over time, what I\u2019ve learned is that actually people really need me to be more explicit about what my priorities are. How do I think about things, why am I thinking about the business in this way? It\u2019s been interesting because you actually see, \u201cWow, I guess it wasn\u2019t so obvious what Lisa was thinking.\u201d That\u2019s one of the larger pieces of feedback\u2014people actually want to know what you\u2019re thinking. I thought I was very clear. But one needs to be much more explicit, and communication is probably where I\u2019ve spent the most time in terms of reaching all of the various audiences. You need a slightly tailored voice for each audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was. It was right in 2000, and there were a lot of interesting decisions, thoughts. I learned so much from that experience. From Lou in particular, what I remember the most\u2014because, I was five years out of school, so I was not thinking about being CEO material, I was just having the opportunity to learn\u2014is how externally focused he was. I\u2019ve really taken that into my thinking. Many companies can get very, very internally focused. When you realize that, hey, there\u2019s a whole world out there\u2014that whole 360 of input that includes internal stakeholders, media, customers, partners, that whole sphere of influence, it was really eye-opening to me, spending time with Lou. His desire to directly understand the technology I thought was also very interesting. He was not a technologist at all, so part of my job was to\u2026 teach is not the right word but expose him to different technology things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you think about where technology is today, it is really part of every part of our life, right? Whether you\u2019re at work, at home, in your car, you see technology everywhere. I\u2019m hopeful for a day when technology actually improves our quality of life and the quality of our business in a far more substantial way than it does today, and that\u2019s what I think artificial intelligence can do. It can make each one of us smarter. It can make each one of our businesses better. It could help us answer questions that today are not clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My favorite examples are the ones in healthcare, because healthcare is something very personal to all of us. I observe how medicine works today, and because I\u2019m such an engineer, I think, \u201cThere\u2019s still too much art in this.\u201d If we can use the combination of the largest supercomputers in the world, which we do build, that really drive drug discovery, medical discovery, and use artificial intelligence to help us analyze all of the personal data out there and prolong people\u2019s lives, help people who are suffering, that\u2019s a pretty wonderful use of technology. I view that as only one aspect of it, if you think about all of these other things that you can do in terms of running better, more productive businesses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t worry about the replacing humans thing. I believe that the right use of technology will make the best employees, the best leaders, so much better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s interesting. Some people liked it, some people didn\u2019t. In that first year, we actually lost a number of senior executives. They weren\u2019t sure that they were ready for the journey that we were going to be on. But then we got the people who were ready. Whenever there\u2019s a CEO transition, whether it\u2019s a good transition or a bad transition doesn\u2019t matter. Whenever there\u2019s a CEO transition, it causes everybody in the company to reassess, \u201cAm I in, or am I not in?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some people weren\u2019t in because what I laid out was, \u201cThis will take a long time, guys. Buckle up. This ain\u2019t a one- or two-year journey. This is a five-year journey, but it\u2019s a wonderful journey.\u201d For those who stayed, I think they did the best work of their lives, and that\u2019s something that we can all be super proud of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AMD\u2019s longtime CEO Lisa Su led one of the most impressive turnarounds in the history of the technology business. As the age of AI dawns, she\u2019s just getting started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22997,"featured_media":349806,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[871],"tags":[57692],"class_list":["post-349805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-leadershipmanagement","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nRebooting AMD<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nTaking Risks<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
What was your motivation when you joined AMD? Did you say to yourself, \u201cThis could be great\u201d or, \u201cI need to take this challenge\u201d?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
At the time, you were seen as the less expensive PC alternative to Intel. Looking from the outside, the strategy\u2014that AMD was going to become the high-performance leader\u2014wasn\u2019t obvious.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Do you think talent attraction was helped by going in that direction? Because nobody wants to work for the No. 2 commodity chip maker?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
How do you think about assessing talent? How do you think about your key lieutenants? In those beginning days, how did you know who was going to come on this ride, and who was not?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
It sounds like trying to get a little bit of the technological swagger back and be a little more swashbuckling.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
What\u2019s your process for making those big bets? Who do you bring around you? Who do you look to for advice?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Is there a process that you have for assessing that risk-reward ratio? In every business there\u2019s risk-reward going on. Your business just happens to have some of the biggest capital expenditures of any business in the world.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Is that how you keep your own learning going? How do you manage your own development?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Do you have a standing meeting of the week? Who comes, and what would you say makes it a Lisa Su meeting?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
How do you shape the culture through that? How have you seen that spill down through the organization?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Can you talk to us a little bit about the nuts and bolts of leadership development in AMD?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
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Do you actually have a map of where you need the highest-talent people?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
How do you think about developing and giving feedback to your lieutenants?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Changing focus for a second, you\u2019re arguably in the most important industry in the world right now. What do you look at that other CEOs might not be thinking about that they should be?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Again, this is a culture change as much as it\u2019s a technology change. A lot of CEOs see it as magical, amazing, and then they start to try it, and they skip off the surface of it.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
And how are you acculturating people to that? The training in itself is a big challenge for people. It\u2019s not a software, it\u2019s open ended.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Within your industry, obviously NVIDIA has had a huge run-up. How are you talking about the challenge of making sure that you have a place at the table with the AI that is to come?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Could you talk more about that? There was a story where you once drove through an ice storm to visit Hewlett Packard Enterprise\u2019s CEO. Being the salesperson-in-chief is something that a lot of CEOs wrestle with. How do you do it?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
How has your leadership style evolved since 2014? What advice would you give your younger self?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
One of the people you had as a mentor was Lou Gerstner. What did you learn from that time? It was a big moment for IBM.<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
For those of us who aren\u2019t as deep into this technology, help us see the future through your eyes. What will change in business and society over the next decade?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n
Final question: After you gave that day-one CEO speech, what happened? What was the response?<\/h5>\n\n\n\n