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In 1980, Pistorio was international general manager of Motorola’s semiconductor division – responsible for one third of the division’s revenues. He was the first non-American corporate vice president ever to be elected to the Motorola board.
“In 1980, I was invited to run SGS. SGS was an Italian company which was desperately sick from a financial point of view,” recalls Pistorio, “SGS had sales of around $100 million (Motorola’s chip sales were then $1 billion). SGS had been losing money for ten years. Italy was a very difficult place, with terrorism and union power making life very difficult, but I accepted the challenge and took the job.”
Why? “Four reasons: First, being general manager of a division is important but it’s different to being the CEO of a company. As CEO you can take full responsibility. You really can be accounted for failure or success. Maybe if I’d waited a few years more I could have become the same in Motorola. But I thought this was important. It was a professional challenge.”
“The second thing was because this was in Italy. To take the challenge in a very sick Italian company, and feeling that I could turn it around, it gave me a sense of national pride. So there was not only professional pride, but pride in my country.”
“The third thing was homesickness. My parents were becoming older, my wife’s parents were getting older, we thought it was a good time to go home.”
“Fourth, SGS had some important niche technologies like smartpower – intelligent power. I knew because they were my competitors.”
“I left Motorola in a very friendly way,” says Pistorio, “I didn’t leave Motorola – I went to SGS.”
I was really impressed with the vision of Pistorio…. He addressed many times to Indian colleagues and his word of wisdoms were always visionary about semiconductor industry. His anticipations on the consolidations were very much inlined with what has happened in last 4-5 years. The survivors have escaped greatly and few players have succumbed to the global competitions like Philips, Motorola, Infineon etc.