Leading a team out from the brink of defeat: Intel, Part Two.

I wrote about Intel when it was on the brink. Here is what the last fifteen months taught me about EVP. 

Last year, when I built my guest lecture on the Employer Value Proposition, I reached for a live case study rather than a textbook one. I chose Intel. 

At the time, it felt almost reckless. Intel was scraping the bottom. The stock had fallen to around $21, an unthinkable number for a company that had powered most of the world’s personal computing for a generation. I had written about it in some detail on our blog, drawing on my own history with the company. My first real computer was an Intel Pentium, a custom build my cousin assembled during his summer break from Carnegie Mellon. My father, an engineer who handled IT procurement, always told me the same thing when we went shopping for parts: Intel represents quality, so let us buy the best Intel we can afford. 

By 2025, that quality story had unravelled. Intel never took GPUs seriously, lost its pole position in advanced manufacturing, and missed the rise of AI. But the part that interested me was not the technology. It was the culture. The reporting pointed to a company that had become political, siloed, risk averse, and complacent from years of dominance. In other words, the organisation had stopped organising itself to win. 

That is exactly why Intel belonged in a lecture about the EVP. Because an EVP is not a tagline or a recruitment slogan. It is excavated from your culture. It is the promise you make about what it is genuinely like to work in your organisation, and it only holds if leadership actually steers people towards it. 

The moment the promise was made 

When Lip-Bu Tan took over in March 2025, one of the first things he did was write to every employee. I put that memo in the deck and ran a sentiment analysis on it, because it was a near perfect example of an EVP being articulated in real time, whether he called it that or not. 

He didn’t glaze over the problems. Every line carried a direct negation. Too slow, too complex, too set in our ways. He named the elephant in the room, committed to becoming an engineering focused company again, promised to flatten the bureaucracy, and made the hard admission that the workforce would shrink. Then came the two lines that stayed with me:

• That this was the chance to reinvent an industry icon and pull off a comeback that would be studied in business schools for generations; and
• That he had joined knowing it would be the hardest job of his career, but there was no place he would rather be. 

That is a People Promise. Directness as a value. Engineering excellence as the identity. Leadership visibly committing to the long haul. Steer, Experience and Perception, all being realigned at once. 

Looking back now 

15 months later, the promise is being kept, and the numbers have followed. 

• Intel now trades near $100 to $105, up roughly 368% over the past year from that $21 low, and up about 176% year to date.
• The 52-week high touched $142.35. In Q2 2026, revenue reached $16.1 billion, up 25% year over year, which Tan described as the company’s strongest revenue growth in more than fifteen years and the seventh consecutive quarter of beating expectations.
• Data Center and AI revenue jumped 59%. Investor confidence was strong enough that a $20 billion equity raise came in oversubscribed, and both NVIDIA and the US government have taken equity stakes.
• Jim Cramer has called it one of the greatest turnarounds he had ever seen. 

I want to be careful here, because in my original piece I was openly sceptical. I said I was not optimistic, that I was not sure Intel was too big to fail, and that I would simply watch what the new CEO did. The turnaround is also not finished. The foundry business still ran a $2.1 billion operating loss last quarter, and roughly a third of the workforce was cut to get here. This was not painless, and it was not magic. 

What is it that I see, then?

I see a leader who articulated a clear promise about culture and identity, communicated it with unusual honesty, and then executed against it with discipline. The EVP was the common thread that ran from the top of the house all the way through to the results. 

Why this matters for the rest of us 

Most organisations will never face a crisis this public. But the lesson holds at any scale. When your people can feel where leadership is taking them, believe the promise because it is backed by real action, and see themselves invited into the comeback, culture moves. And when culture moves, the business tends to follow. 

That is the whole argument of my lecture in one sentence. If data is our compass, the EVP is our true north. Intel just gave us a fifteen month reminder of what happens when a leader points the whole organisation at it. 

I remember ending my original piece by wishing Tan luck and hoping he would avoid a Kodak moment. Fifteen months on, it looks less like Kodak and more like the business school case study he said it would become. 

Where this leaves me 

I did end up putting a little of my own money into Intel after writing that lecture. But that is not really the point of this story, and it is the least interesting part of it. 

What the last fifteen months quietly confirmed is simpler. Culture is not soft, and it is not separate from the business. It is the business. A clear, honestly told promise about who you are and how you work can move an entire organisation, and when that promise is kept, the results tend to follow the people. 

On to a personal reflection: quietly taking a deterministic view in an openly opportunistic industry, where volume and vanity can thrive, is sometimes a lonely road. But that is the work we get to do at GoodPeople, and I do not take it for granted. We are lucky to work with leaders who genuinely invest in understanding their workforce, not for show, but because they have seen for themselves the direct line between how people feel and how the business performs. 

Intel just gave the rest of us a very public reminder. Your EVP is a promise made. Your culture is your promise, kept. The organisations that treat it that way are usually the ones still standing, and thriving, when the cycle turns. 

Well then – good luck, Lip-Bu Tan! You’re already writing that B School case study. Just like you promised.