Pasquale Pistorio, who put together the small, loss-making chip businesses Thomson Semiconducteurs and SGS-Ates, to form STMicroelctronics and drove it to become the fifth largest semiconductor company in the world, worked his first 17 years in the semiconductor business at Motorola. He admired American business culture.
"I fit very well in the American culture, I found it very easy, and I think my American colleagues found me very easy," says Pistorio, "I'm a very basic person, and I think Americans are basic people and like basic people - they think that if you are performing, you are a good man; that if you are not performing you are no good. I am the same. So I think it was an easy fit."
"I think the basics are very important", adds Pistorio, "I think values like honouring what you commit to do, not changing your mind, being at ease with yourself, having business integrity in the broad sense are essential. I value these things in the American culture, and they are values which I have been adopting myself all my life."
"My 17 years at Motorola were very good. They taught me a lot. I learnt to be a manager coping with the human side of the Italian environment and the European environment, while also coping with the American rigour of business practicality. And this, in the end, is my managerial style - marrying American rigour with a good sensibility for people."
"I believe the formative influences of my childhood, working for my father, prepared me for the American culture", says Pistorio, "my father taught me to be an optimist, to be at peace with my conscience, that if you are doing what is necessary you should not worry, to have integrity, to be very straight - this is life, but it becomes business also."
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