Mr. Rodgers' neighborhood - Cypress Semiconductor CEO Thurman John Rodgers - Cover Story

Chief Executive, The, Jan-Feb, 1995 by Joseph L. McCarthy

After a brief tumble, Cypress Semiconductor is back in the black and gunning for $1 billion in sales. But the chieftain of this warrior tribe isn't a kindly gentleman in a cardigan sweater. He's more like a cross between his favorite movie characters - Robocop, Terminator, and The Great Santini.

"You've got to see this," says a secretary, ushering a visitor into a spacious corner office in the San Jose, CA, headquarters of chipmaker Cypress Semiconductor. Atop a bookcase rests a small jar of petroleum jelly. A polite description of the sticker on the jar is impossible; suffice it to say, it indicates the emollient is for employees who face a drilling from the CEO who stalks these halls. A glance around the room completes a cursory profile of the executive in question, who's wrapping up a meeting in an adjacent conference room, visible through a glass partition. On one wall hangs a framed 1993 Fortune cover, which describes him as one of "America's Toughest Bosses." There are cans of dog food labeled to reflect the products of other chip makers, and in a corner a Navy practice bomb stenciled in white paint with the names of Cypress' competitors. The meeting adjourns, and a fireplug of a man in shirtsleeves with short-cropped blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses strides purposefully into the room and thrusts his hand toward the visitor: "How are you?" he says. "I'm T.J. Rodgers."

The introduction is cordial but unnecessary. Throughout his career, Thurman John Rodgers has been a popular figure both in the business press and in such general-interest publications as Esquire. Pound-for-pound, he seems to attract as much coverage as anyone in Silicon Valley, despite the fact that 12-year-old Cypress is hardly the largest or the most successful company in these parts. That's because its most famous product isn't the memory chips it churns out for computers and other high-tech equipment; it's 46-year-old Rodgers himself, who packs as much panache into his 5'9" frame as his company crams circuits onto a silicon wafer. In an industry marked by jet-setters and marketing wizards such as Jerry Sanders of Advanced Micro Devices and Intel's Andy Grove, Rodgers commands attention, because he bellows loudest and displays flashes of technical brilliance. If Herb Kelleher is the king of corporate madcap, Bill Gates the prototypical eccentric genius, and Jack Welch the agent provocateur of re-engineering, Rodgers is an unlikely, outrageous mix of Newt Gingrich and Stephen Hawking, with a dash of tough-guy Arnold Schwarzenegger thrown in. At one time or another, he has lined up in his cross hairs the Clinton-Gore administration, a brigade's worth of his peers, the Sematech consortium, big-company "dinosaurs," and Cypress staffers foolish enough to be less than letter-perfect. In so doing, he frequently sets new standards for audacity. There was the near-fistfight with AMD's Sanders in a Palo Alto parking lot in 1983, shortly after Rodgers left the company, taking several senior staffers with him. There was the time he had white stretch limousines escort Russian businessmen to Cypress headquarters, where he rolled out a real red carpet. There was Rodgers, ceremoniously protected by armed guards, distributing the company's quarterly profit sharing in gold coins. And there are the jogging shorts he loves to be photographed in, fashioned in red, white, and blue after the American flag.

On the bleeding edge or bloody outrageous? Everything T.J. does is "absolutely calculated" to raise Cypress' profile, says Dan McCranie, Cypress' vice president of sales and marketing, who was CEO of $40 million Seeq Technology before Rodgers lured him away 15 months ago. A longtime friend of the boss, McCranie worked with Rodgers at the now-defunct American Microsystems and later at AMD. When asked about Rodgers' epic abrasiveness - employees typically have the durability of stock cars at a Sunday afternoon demolition derby, or they don't stick on the Cypress track - McCranie chuckles: "Some of us have carbuncled backsides. We don't need the Vaseline as much."

Rodgers founded Cypress Semiconductor in 1982 and guided the company through a period of rapid growth - conspicuous because it coincided with the sharp decline in market share by U.S. companies versus the Japanese. Priding itself on all-American operations while competitors were shifting to less-costly facilities overseas, the company avoided price competition by focusing on niche markets ignored by larger manufacturers, and by turning out superfast memory chips - the Maseratis of the business. Seeking to maintain start-up intensity as sales grew to several hundred million dollars, Rodgers computerized operations and structured Cypress as a string of independent companies, each with its own stock, relying on the corporate center to supply venture capital. Wall Street swooned, saluting him as a prototype for a new breed of CEO and his company as a model for others.

Rodgers scoffs at the notion he was spoiled by success, but does allow he pushed some wrong buttons. Like the early experimental jets flown by his hero, pilot Chuck Yeager, Cypress plunged earthward in a flameout. "I did not have the 50,000-foot view, and we got caught," the CEO says.