Grove, the legendary Intel visionary, probably saw in Sanghi the same qualities that are still immediately evident today. He is a no-frills kind of guy. He turned Microchip Technology from a dead division of General Instrument in 1989, into a semiconductor heavyweight with a $5.5 billion market cap that has remained highly profitable through the recent technology meltdown. But he’s stayed out of the limelight.

It’s immediately obvious that he is tenaciously committed to success, but he lacks the propensity for corporate jargon that plagues so many executives. He talks about tangible things — products, profits, and the productivity of his people.

Sanghi says that despite coming from a family of lawyers and judges, he always wanted to be a technology manager, so he pursued engineering, first at Punjab Engineering College, then at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, before going to Intel in 1978. But when he joined ailing Microchip in 1990 his friends chided his decision. “They said they thought I had more intelligence than that,” he remembers. Granted, Microchip was hemorrhaging money. It had been bought from General Instrument by a group of venture capitalists for zero dollars. In a year, the existing management had already burned through $10 million of the $12 million investors had pumped into the company. Sanghi was going to have to rescue a sinking ship.

He became president soon after he joined, reworked the technology and products, and raised new money in 1991. But he didn’t turn Microchip around just by changing the product line.

When Sanghi talks about corporate culture it’s not just a line he delivers as a sound byte. Asked what makes a good corporate leader, he immediately turns the question on its head: “My feeling is that culture and management is what employees say it is, not just what the CEO says, or what you say in a training class. If they are one and the same then you have arrived, and congratulations are in order.”

Sanghi’s whole philosophy of management seems to be the relentless pursuit of a kind of corporate harmony, where everybody is working in sync towards a common goal. It’s a concept that every company claims to hold dear, but Sanghi implies that in many companies, management is actually out of touch with the real situation.

“Companies have to have a system in place where they are continuously measuring the culture they are implementing, and measuring the correlation between what is being perpetuated, versus what the CEO says the culture is,” he explains. “If there are differences then there should be a corrective action mechanism. Either you [the CEO] change what you’re saying and say you like what the real culture is, or you change it to what you want it to be.”

For Sanghi, the early days of restructuring Microchip were focused around instilling key vales and cultural elements within the enterprise, all the while making tough decisions to shut down factories and delete old product lines.

Today microchip employees fill out a yearly confidential survey that asks them to rate what percentage of the time Microchip practices the values it teaches. This is Sanghi’s insight into the real internal direction of his company. The results have been positive. Sanghi proudly points out that of 3,000 worldwide employees every single one is part of the employee stock option plan.

You can’t argue with results. The company is built on proprietary products that sell to 30,000 customers spread all over the globe. No single customer makes up more than two percent of the company’s business. Even amidst the market carnage, Microchip stock was up 80 percent in 2001.

In fact the company’s stock has been a rocket ship since it went public in 1993 — up nearly 5,000 percent. A few years ago, Sanghi got a call from the owner of a dairy farm in Kansas, who was a small investor in Sequoia Capital, one of the original investors that helped turn Microchip around. After the IPO, Sequoia had distributed the farmer some Microchip stock, and he put it away for a couple of years only to realize that it had turned into a pile of money. He purchased a rodeo with the proceeds of the investment, and was calling Sanghi to see if it would be okay to call it “Microchip rodeo.”

Sanghi recounts the anecdote with a clear sense of satisfaction. But he admits that corporate leadership isn’t for everybody. He essentially admits that Microchip is his life, and it’s hard to balance his work with other things.

“I think that’s the hardest and I’m probably not the best role model for it. I don’t know if anybody is,” he says. “A CEO can be a lonely person.” But he adds, “If I didn’t have this I’d probably be bored. I wouldn’t be happy shuttling kids to school. I don’t look at it as a sacrifice. It’s part of who I am.”

This may be the essence of leadership. After achieving tremendous personal success as an entrepreneurial turnaround artist at Microchip, Sanghi has elevated himself into the realm of respected corporate executives. It’s probably the most pressure-packed and difficult position in the corporate world. You can ask why Craig Barrett works, or why Bill Gates still works. In the end it’s probably because corporate management runs in their veins. This is clearly true of Sanghi.
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