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Autonomous strategic behaviour is what happens when people inside a company start building something the official strategy never asked for. Robert Burgelman of Stanford Graduate School of Business, author of Strategy Is Destiny and Inside Corporate Innovation, has studied it for almost fifty years. He returns to The Innovation Show to discuss his new paper with Sasanka Sekhar Chanda, which revisits his Intel field research through James March’s model of exploration and exploitation.
The headline finding is simple. Top leaders keep backing an autonomous initiative when it teaches the company something substantially new.
Weeds and seeds at Intel
Andy Grove admitted that in weeding out the weeds he also pulled some of the potential seeds. Burgelman’s paper looks at three episodes of autonomous strategic behaviour at Intel to understand how a leader tells the two apart.
The first is the seed that became the company. In the 1980s Intel made memory chips. A group built a chip for Busicom, a Japanese firm developing a desktop calculator, and one senior executive later admitted Intel did it to sell more memories. Middle managers then allocated scarce fab capacity using a rule that favoured the highest margin per wafer start. Memory was becoming a commodity, so over four generations of DRAM the microprocessor team won the capacity every time. Revenue lines crossed, and it still took two or three years before top management recognised microprocessors as the new mainstream.
The second went the other way. An Intel engineer championed a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture. Insiders nicknamed it a YARP, yet another RISC processor. Years later the same architecture powered ARM and the mobile devices at the edge of computing. At the time, though, it taught Intel little it did not already know.
The third, networking, failed through ambiguity. Grove told the team running it, “I don’t like statements that are somewhat right but mostly wrong.” A successor later argued that big processors need big pipes. By then Cisco owned the pipes.
What autonomous strategic behaviour looks like inside a company
Every company has a strategy built around the product markets it already serves. Burgelman calls strategy a disciplining mechanism, and focus means saying no all the time. Grove was its great exponent.
New people arrive with different skills and spot opportunities in markets that are still forming. They start developing products for segments outside the official strategy, which is why Burgelman calls the behaviour autonomous. Most of them fail, and a handful end up redefining the company. March offers two reasons people try. Some follow an obligatory logic rooted in self-image. Others follow a consequential logic, confident their skills will travel and short of opportunity in the mainstream.
Nearly fifty years ago an executive at a science-based chemical company gave Burgelman the insight at the heart of the paper. “New businesses have growth problems that top management does not easily understand. So if you don’t have a clear strategy, you only ask them what you know they will be able to understand. But then you are always behind, and that will destroy your credibility.”
Why brilliant leaders reuse old playbooks
Burgelman borrows from Henry Kissinger, who observed that a president arrives with a strategy and lacks the time to build a new one. Leaders carry cognitive rules, beliefs about what made them successful. In 1993 Grove became convinced video conferencing on the PC would be huge and moved Pat Gelsinger, later Intel’s CEO, to run ProShare. Grove rejected niche markets in healthcare and mortgage lending and chose the Normandy landing approach that had worked for the 386, 486 and Pentium. Intel spent $750 million on a business that never exceeded about $30 million.
Margin thinking also cost Intel the iPhone chip, because finance teams feared lower margins would drag the share price. Burgelman’s test for culture follows from that. Watch who gets the money and who gets promoted.
The burden of proof and the people map
Burgelman calls the battleground strategic context determination. Here the autonomous team tries to convince top management to amend the strategy, and the burden of proof sits with them. Grove described his job as moving people from maybe to yes or no.
Two stories show how to carry that burden. At Nike, a manager building the women’s business drew a people map of likely supporters, likely enemies and the undecided middle. That business now runs to billions. Infosys Consulting grew from zero to about $800 million in Silicon Valley, then was folded into its parent’s operating model, where travel needed two signatures and business class was off limits. Its founders never mapped the people around them, and Burgelman believes they should have approached the CEO first.
Spotting a strategic inflection point
Grove once told his top 40 executives they had low-end phobia, because growth at the low end of the PC market was outpacing the high end. Burgelman’s lesson is to watch the first derivative. If the rate of change keeps increasing year on year, you are probably facing an inflection point.
He offers one more indicator of autonomous strategic behaviour driven by real conviction. 3M famously gave staff 15% of their time for their own ideas, and a 3M executive told him that 15% sat between 125 and 140. Another source told him the best measure of autonomous initiatives was the car park on Friday nights and Saturday mornings.
Read the working paper, Autonomous Strategic Behavior, Organizational Learning and Top Management Support, on the Stanford GSB website. Aidan and Robert will cover Inside Corporate Innovation in a future episode.
About the Guest
Robert A. Burgelman is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and one of the leading scholars of corporate entrepreneurship and strategy-making. His books include Strategy Is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company’s Future and Inside Corporate Innovation, and his decades of field research at Intel shaped how scholars and executives understand autonomous strategic behaviour. Find his work at Stanford GSB.
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan.
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. Discover thought leadership from many Innovation Show guests at the Kyndryl Institute.
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Frequently asked questions
What is autonomous strategic behaviour?
Autonomous strategic behaviour, a term coined by Stanford’s Robert Burgelman, describes employees developing products or services for markets outside a company’s official strategy. Many of these initiatives fail. Some, like Intel’s microprocessor, eventually become the company’s core business.
Why did Intel back the microprocessor but not RISC?
Burgelman and Chanda find that leaders keep supporting an autonomous initiative when it adds knowledge substantially different from the existing strategy. The microprocessor taught Intel something new and won fab capacity on margin. The RISC architecture taught Intel little it did not already know.
Who carries the burden of proof for a new venture inside a company?
Burgelman argues the people driving the autonomous initiative carry the burden of proof. They must convince top management and peers to amend the strategy. Mapping likely supporters, opponents and the undecided, as a Nike manager did for the women’s business, helps them do it.
How can you tell if you face a strategic inflection point?
Burgelman, drawing on Andy Grove, recommends watching the first derivative of the growth curve. If the rate of change keeps increasing over several years, the shift is probably real. Steady, flat change suggests there is no inflection point yet.
How do you read a company’s real culture?
Burgelman says two things reveal real culture, who gets the money and who gets promoted. At Intel, the rule of giving fab capacity to the highest-margin products showed a deep identity as a leading-edge technology company, and later contributed to missing the iPhone chip.
Who is a keynote speaker on innovation and change in Ireland?
Aidan McCullen is a Dublin-based keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change. He is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, host of The Innovation Show and author of Undisruptable. He works with organisations across Ireland and internationally on transformation and corporate innovation.