Will the high-tech world ever get away from Intel?

Probably not. The company supplies chips for around 80 percent of the world's PCs and servers and heavily influences the standards for packaging, manufacturing, lithography and computer design.

But the company also plays a large, and often unseen role, in corporate management. Intel alumni are everywhere, and they take their aggressive obsessions with numbers, manufacturability, constructive confrontation (i.e., yelling at meetings; drinking afterward), scalability and "two-in-a-box" management wherever they go. Two of Silicon Valley's most storied VCs, John Doerr and Bill Davidow, came from the Intel sales department. Chip companies like Rambus and National Semiconductor are run by ex-Intel guys. It's like a finishing school for the hard-nosed.

Get the rest of the story at Green Light.