Leadership under fire

Dov Frohman was the head of Intel Israel at the start of the First Gulf War, and it fell to him to determine how the company would respond. In this first-person account, he describes what it's like to hold not just the future of a company but the future of an entire industry and the lives of many employees in his hands. Israeli businesses were used to preparing for war, or so Frohman thought when he assigned a task force to draw up plans in the fall of 1990 to replace enough called-up reservists to operate the Jerusalem fabrication plant, the Haifa design center, and the Tel Aviv sales and marketing office on skeleton crews. But that was before Saddam Hussein stationed ballistic missiles just seven minutes away from Tel Aviv. Concerned about chemical attacks, the Israeli civil defense agency called for all nonessential Israeli businesses to shut down when the allied attacks against Iraq began on January 17, 1991. The first missiles hit Jerusalem in the small hours of the next day. Instead of being behind the war zone, Intel Israel was going to be right in it. Frohman called in his task force and drove the 20 minutes to work that morning. it would have been easy to follow the civil defense directive and close down. Everyone was doing it; Intel's senior executives in California would have understood. But Frohman chose to ignore the directive and asked his employees to continue coming to work to keep operations running. This is the story of how and why the Intel senior executive made that decision, how he carried it out, and what the consequences were. it is a lesson about decision making when the stakes couldn't be higher.