It is a little known fact that, before he left Fairchild Semiconductor to become the CEO of National Semiconductor, Charlie Sporck had several meetings with Sir John Clark, CEO of Plessey, about him becoming CEO of Plessey Semiconductors.
At the time Sporck was the General Manager of Fairchild Semiconductor, reporting to Bob Noyce.
"The idea was to start a new company in the US and make me CEO of all Plessey semiconductor operations", says Sporck, "Plessey would provide all the money. We would be free to manage as we saw fit, providing that we met our targets."
Three other executives from Fairchild were to be in the Plessey management group: Pierre Lamond, Fred Bialek and Roger Smullen.
"A committee of four Plessey executives was formed and sent over to California to check us out", recalls Sporck, "the four Plessey men, and the four of us met at a restaurant. We began with a lengthy cocktail session. The date was inconvenient for me, because it was a Friday evening, and I had promised to take my family on a skiing holiday that weekend, but I delayed our departure long enough for the Plessey meeting.
"We had barely finished dinner when one of the Plessey representatives leaned into the table and, in all seriousness, asked:' Now what, exactly, it is a semiconductor?'"
"Roger Smullen had the first reaction", recalls Sporck, "he tossed his napkin on the table, got up from his chair and left the restaurant. I made my excuses about a family commitment, and Pierre and I left Fred Bialek to stay with the Plessey men."
Later on Bialek sent Sporck a note summing up the evening. 'I was left with the task of telling the Plessey delegation that we were going to go ahead with the deal', wrote Bialek, 'I went to their hotel the next morning to tell them of our decision. They chased me down the hall in a panic, asking me to reconsider, because they knew they had blown it, and feared what would happen to them when they got home.'
Plessey lost the chance to recruit not only one of the industry's legendary CEOs, but also a group of its most talented and influential executives.
This is the story Charlie told Rob Walker in his Silicon Genesis interview in 2000. (see http://silicongenesis.stanford.edu/transcripts/spork.htm) However it differs from that told to Christophe Lecuyer by both Sporck and Lamond in interviews recorded in 2001 and included on page 260 of his book "Making Silicon Valley." In this version, the talks continued for over 6 months and fell apart when the New York lawyers hired by Plessey to negotiate the deal balked at the group's request for stock options.
Interesting. But the first time I heard of this story was reading Sporck's book Spin-Off, published in 2001, when he tells the story in the form repeated here.
Reminds me of the problems between Signetics and Corning, when the latter owned the former. When Signetics wanted to buy a new epitaxial reactor, one Corning person wanted to know the expected lifetime, where would it be in 20 years time. Told that it would have been donated to a university, or scrapped, he was horrified. Corning was still using a pie-plate press installed in the 1920s. No doubt this contributed to the decision to sell Signetics to Philips a few years later. I overheard a conversation about that transaction on February 22nd 1973 (our wedding anniversary), my wife and I went to a local restaurant, where Signetics execs at a nearby table were complaining to someone (I presume Philips people) about how Corning did not understand the semiconductor business.