Welcome

Dear readers,

It has been a bit more than 3 years since the Microchip Revolution came out and less than 6 months for Teamwork, Europe’s economic recovery 1945-1952 first publication.

I will love to have your comments and questions on the two books.

Maybe the first one would be why pick such widely different subjects?

For me they are not that different. What I found fascinating in these two situations is how highly motivated teams working intensely accomplished incredible things, much more than anyone could have even imagined.

Microchip. E. Marshall Wilder and I worked in many of the leading Silicon Valley semiconductor companies from the ‘70s to the ‘90s: Fairchild, Intersil, AMD, IDT and had friends at Intel, National, Linear Technology, Maxim, and others. We wanted to share the passion, excitement that made these thirty years seem to be gone in a few hours for us. We were delighted to discover this was not just a Bay area madness, when we talked to Micron Technology which started and still has strong operations in Boise, Idaho. It tuned out they were just as passionate but, in many ways, more original in their approach to similar problems because they had few other technical colleagues to turn to. Just like us though they achieved miracles because their team, from the hourly operators to the top managers were wholly committed to the same goals.

Teamwork.  The scene is set 20-25 years earlier in Paris, France, a few years after the end of WWII. The incredibly generous Marshall Plan would trigger the same passionate dedication in the delegates of the 18 countries European OEEC organization which would administer its aid. One of them was my father in his late thirties’, early forties’. He was head of the Swiss delegation and would come home at any hour of the day or night barely able to talk being so tired. This was no theoretical economics, it was hands on economics with only 4 years of funding to restart the economies of 18 nations of 270 millions. The number of experiments they managed to have success with would be incredible. As a child I could sense this passion. It stayed with me during my whole adult life. When I finally had some time in 2021, I researched the papers of my father and the vast library of the OEEC-OCDE, and I was not disappointed to read the minutes of the OEEC meetings, full of ideas, proposals, urgency to achieve goals not just for their individual countries but for the greater good of all. You can also see meetings starting at 9 in the morning finishing at midnight or even 2 or 4 in the morning. I thought their achievements and passion was worth writing about.

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Chers lecteurs,

Comme les deux langues de l’OECE étaient le l’anglais et le français, je me suis lancé dans une traduction de Teamwork, avec le titre: Ensemble pour relancer l’économie européenne 1945-1952.

Le livre a été publié le 5 avril 2024.

Je me suis fait aider par le traducteur Azure AI de Microsoft. Quoique cet outil ait amené la traduction artificielle à un niveau nettement supérieur à ce qui se faisait il y a 10 ans, il a quand même fallu 2 mois de travail assidu à deux pour atteindre la qualité désirée. Il n’y a donc pas pour le moment de traduction « automatique ».  J’espère que le livre vous plaira.