Global Leadership Summit 2023 Speaker: Pat Gelsinger

Pat Gelsinger was great! His talk had a great balance of inpiring, informative, and some recognition of his faith in Christ was in there too! He was a good follow to Erwin McManus. I even made a note in his talk pointing back to McManus’ talk.

Look at the humility he had when he started! He recognized that he didn’t have the answer to all of your leadership questions, but that you should add what he has to say into your own philosophy. That is so good. Every speaker should have that attitude.

And I just about fell out of my chair when he said “you all know what computer chips are, right?” I remember people talking about computer chips in Covid-19 vaccines. Where are those people now? Where are the microchips?

It made me laugh so hard because I think there were a lot of Christians saying that and this is a Christian conference. I could see where he could offend some folks right off the bat by making fun of them in his opening jokes, but I also feel like most people didn’t get the joke. But I digress…

This whole section was really good. He had a higher-up executive call him in and choose to mentor him. That higher up person chose to make this guy better and help him grow. The dude was preparing his own succession plan. He was grooming a CEO to take over the company in a good way.

He did some big time lobbying for microchip manufacturing. Talked to the President and a lot of senators/congresspeople. Then he prayed and left it all in God’s hands. He cheered on his company every Friday during Covid to work hard on those mind-control chips (jokes!) and to help them all be cared for and human during those weird times.

He said to find what your passion is and make it your job. He did that. I don’t know if that’s the best thing in the world to do, but for those that are called to that, it’s awesome.

Then this whole thing about fasting and praying for his employees just blew me away. Like it’s not enough that he’s the freaking CEO of Intel, but he fasts and prays every Thursday all day (this talk was on a Thursday!) and he shared which specific employee out of 150,000 that he was praying for today. I’ve known CEOs with teams of 15 (can you really call that a CEO?) that didn’t care so much for their staff or know them as personally as this guy. It made me just want to go work for him.

The artistic AI interlude after his talk

Ok, so there are artsy bits to the GLS and about half of them are cool and the other half are a good chance to go out in the lobby and chat with folks. The musicians did a number that was supposed to be written by AI on the spot, and it was pretty funny. This is all I have in my notes. I remember I laughed a lot, but I don’t remember more than I wrote. I’m putting it here for fun.