How was Keller able to pull off so much impactful work over so many organizations? i.e. what proportion of his impact was attributable to novel ideas, solo engineering implementation ability, engineering leadership, or just darn good timing?
it’s a pity he left Intel so quickly. After he was gone, his 5 goals basically fell by the wayside. I don’t think people like being told they’re doing it wrong. I still try to listen to any podcast or interview with him, because I think he has many deep insights.
"This is how were going to validate this chip:
1. go to the beach
2. open your laptop
3. run the chip in emulation through boot
4. tape-in! (send to the fab)
5. take the rest of the year off at the beach "
His point was that we need a simple focus on proving the chip works and then shipping it. If any validation milestone or objective is not directly connected to that, it's not worth doing. We don't need all this extraneous validation and multiple layers of rechecking. Just emulate the thing and then your done.
In his interview with Jordan Petersen he talked about how some people spend all their time "admiring the problem"; Trying to understand and categorize it. Keller didn't want to spend any more time talking about the problem then needed. He was focused on finding good solutions (and it had to be a good solution), and then executing them.
Other super talented people want to work with a Jim Keller. So a company hires a Jim Keller not just because you want his brain, but because you can then go to the next 20 amazing people in the industry and say "come work on Jim Keller's team" – now you have 20 min Jim Kellers on your team and that is enough to move mountains in an extremely specialized field such as chip design.
That being said, even a strong team is still usually only as good as its leadership. You can have all the great ideas in the world, but if the organisation does not allow you to pursue them (or on the other extreme, allows everyone to work on what they think is best) you will still fail to execute.
At the end of the day you need someone to make the correct decisions every step of the way.
Having a good grasp of everything in the whole stack is obviously helpful for setting priorities and goals, and there's a lot of leadership skills involved in getting people to work together and follow the organizational goals. Having a track record of success is obviously helpful, too.