Back to the Basics

​In the seven years since Lisa Su took the helm as CEO for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the company’s stock has risen an astounding 1,700%. Couple that with her 99% CEO approval rating, and it’s tempting to believe her leadership approach must be as magical as it is complicated. (How can we, as leaders, emulate either?) But Su maintains she owes success to real-world leadership principles that are not only easily taught and reproduced, but also apply to any field of business.    

1. Keep Things Simple – When Su first took over as CEO, AMD was nearly $2.5B in debt, and rumors of bankruptcy ran rampant throughout the company. Employee morale was at an all-time low. As one of her first duties, she was pressured by HR to put together a mission, vision and value statement, which could take upward of six months to finalize. Instead, Su drafted a company-wide memo that outlined AMD’s new, streamlined objectives: “To build great products, deepen customer relationships, and simplify everything we do.” During her first “all-hands-on-deck” meeting as CEO, Su encouraged each department to use the three-point criteria as a litmus test, working with its leaders to cut away any work that did not align, and to choose future workflows accordingly.
   
   ​At the company-wide level, this much needed clarity spurred a shift away from markets that did not align with AMD’s strengths (such as cell phone components) back to its core competency—high-performance computing solutions. At the department level, changes were no less profound. With each department now having a clear strategy, and the freedom to pursue it with single-minded focus, employees and leaders both reported greater job satisfaction and confidence in their ability to succeed in future challenges. Years later, photos of departmental whiteboards bearing the three priorities reflect how strongly Su’s simplified message still resonates with her staff.
   
   
2. Follow the Platinum Rule – Very early in her career, Su was appointed team leader over a small group of engineers working on a next-generation microprocessor. “My personal motivation was purely around the project,” she says. Noticing the group was hitting milestones, but did not seem to be achieving beyond those markers, Su’s boss pulled her aside and asked if she ever talked with her people. When she answered in the affirmative, he pressed, “But do you ever ask them how they feel?”
   Su was dumbstruck. “I was treating people the way I expected to be treated,” she remembers. “I don’t expect anybody to ask me how I feel. I just expect to talk about the work.” Following that conversation, Su began paying attention to what motivated or discouraged the different members of her team. She asked questions about their lives outside of work, and began using what she learned about each individual to lead them the way they wanted to be led, rather than the way she wanted to be led. “That was a revelation to me,” she says. “I say this now to my [leadership] team: ‘Our jobs as leaders are to get 120% out of our teams. We’re supposed to make the team better than they thought they could possibly be, and the way to do that is to treat everyone as an individual.’”
   
   
3. Make Leadership Training a Priority – Following her revelation that the most effective leaders draw from a variety of approaches, Su began attending leadership classes and workshops. Years later, she not only continues this practice, but has partnered with a leadership academy to create AMD’s Managers’ Leadership Experience (MLE) Program, where new and existing leaders can grow their skills. “I absolutely think leaders are trained, not born,” Su says. “I believe a huge part of success is when leaders are given training opportunities… You can learn a lot if you’re in the right environment.” Participants in the program agree. AMD senior leaders consistently report over 20% of program participants receive a promotion within one year of completing the leadership training, and middle and lower-level managerial job satisfaction averages 4.65 out of 5.00.
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   ​Su’s straightforward leadership principals have helped transform AMD from a failing company into one of the most successful CPU corporations in the world. When asked why good leadership is important, Su’s response is as simple as it is inspiring: “What you can do as a single person is great, but what you can do when you bring 10 smart people together, or 100 smart people together, or 10,000 smart people together, aligned on a vision, is incredible.” We couldn’t agree more. 

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