Dodging Elephants

Book excerpt: Dodging Elephants tells the story of how a contented teenage soda jerk from Tahoka, Texas, with no plan for his future, found his way to higher education, landed a research job at Texas Instruments, and, over three decades, helped move that company from a small, oil-searching firm to a worldwide electronics giant. From the start J. Fred Bucy was a tireless, driven manager who turned failures into successes. Taking on TI's government equipment division in 1963, he successfully championed ingenious new designs. In 1967 he moved to the company's volatile, ever-expanding semiconductor division, establishing factories worldwide. Meanwhile, he had become an influential advisor on U.S. government export regulation. By 1976, when TI was competing in the consumer market, he was the company's president. Bucy left TI in 1985 after a brief term as CEO. His autobiography is rich in anecdotes and unsparingly honest. Growing up on the rural South Plains of Texas in the years of the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, and World War II, Fred Bucy learned the value of self-reliance and hard work. He seemed headed for a farming career when his life took an abrupt turn. Against substantial odds, and with a family to support, he earned two degrees in Physics and, in 1953, joined a young but promising company, Texas Instruments Incorporated. For the next thirty years he played a major role in TI's phenomenal growth and history-making innovation, moving steadily upward, becoming TI's president in 1976 and its CEO in 1984. It was a tough climb. Along the way he successfully managed a variety of brilliant, often endangered projects including digital computers, sophisticated weaponry, and complex semiconductors, playing a crucial role in the explosive, worldwide expansion of microchip technology. Photo courtesy of Texas Instruments Incorporated