From Intel to Entrepreneurship: Dr. Kevin Gazzara’s 8 Ps for Building Leadership, Authority & Opportunity
The Amazing Authorities Podcast
Dr. Kevin Gazzara joins the podcast to discuss his transition from a nearly three-decade corporate career at Intel to founding a leadership consulting firm after
Key takeaways
- Dr. Gazzara spent nearly 30 years at Intel, managing leadership programs that trained over 40,000 managers across 10 countries before retiring at 50.
- He co-authored The Leader of Oz with Dr. Ali Lakhani and Marlene Lundy, using a business parable format to teach team dynamics and leadership styles.
Main topics
- Corporate-to-entrepreneur transition
- Leadership development & executive coaching
Notable quotes
My success is how many lives have I changed? How many people have I made better leaders so that they're not making their employees miserable any longer?
Conclusion
The episode provides actionable, step-by-step guidance for professiona
Transcript preview
Speaker 2 (0:00) Welcome to the Amazing Authorities Podcast, where game changers, visionaries, and category leaders share how they built their brands, platforms, and global influence. Your host is Mitch Carson, international speaker, media strategist, and creator of the Instant Authority System. If you're ready to learn from those who've done it and want to become the go-to expert in your space, you're in the right place. Speaker 3 (0:31) Experience marks the spot. Dr. Kevin Gazar is our guest today, and this man has got an expansive career. He worked for one of the biggest chip makers in the world, Intel, and that name is because they are intelligent. The people who've been eligible to work there have to have smarts at the nth degree. He's been a professor at some of the most respected institutions in America. And it's my pleasure to have him on the show. He's authored two books, which he's going to show us today. Welcome, Dr. Kevin Gazzara. All Speaker 1 (1:10) right, Mitch. Thanks so much for sharing me with your audience. I appreciate that. My hope is that I'm going to give them some very, very practical advice so they can follow in some of the footsteps of what I've done to create my business. And if you're interested in leaving the corporate world or you've left the corporate world, I'll give you what we did to create an incredible 19 years of successful business and hopefully find it very practical. Speaker 3 (1:41) Well, let's let's I first thing I want to do is I'm a big fan of people who've gone the extra mile and. have written a book. And then there's even a greater level of respect for someone that becomes a multi-book author. It's very similar. I happen to have an undergraduate degree, and then I went back and got a graduate degree. You have a PhD. You put in the extra effort. There's a difference between an A student and an A-plus student. And in the world of being an author, a published author, when you write one book and you write another, let's take a look at your books. Please do a little bit of show and tell. We're going back to the sixth grade. What did you do over the summer and show and tell? Speaker 1 (2:24) All right. Well, I, you know, the first, so first of all, I let, you know, I left, I spent almost 30 years in the corporate world. As you mentioned, the last 18 of those were at Intel, but I had a personal goal to retire at 50. And I was very fortunate. I was able to do that. I took two of my colleagues from Intel, Dr. Ali Lakhani and Marlene Lundy. And we left Intel. Speaker 1 (2:51) I was at the time, you know, I was when I was at Intel, I was, you know, I started as a marketing engineer, I was a product manager, I was a general manager for a small division. But the last 10 years I spent at Intel was managing Intel University and managing Intel's management leadership development programs for the first and midline managers. So that was really my passion is one of the reasons I went back to school and did my doctorate. in organizational leadership, because that was my passion. But what I recognized was that, you know, there's a lot of companies, small to medium-sized companies, that really need to build their leaders, and they don't have $10 million budgets like I had to deal with. You know, in fact, when I had left Intel in 2007, I was managing the Managing Through People program, which is the first-line managers. We used to do 2,500 managers and leaders in 10 countries every year. And when I left, we had just finished training our 40,000th manager. So I got really good at that. And it's something I had a passion for. But I recognized the smaller companies that really needed the help weren't getting the kind of training and development that I was. So we left. We just celebrated our 19th year of being in business. And we get to work with... I mean, not only small to medium-sized companies, but we get to work with a lot of big companies, but in a very small environment. So it might be their purchasing organization or their design organization. We don't do global leadership kind of stuff. And myself and Dr. Lakhani, so Ali was a software manager at Intel. He and I both had kind of the same goals. We left together. I got to know him because he was a doctoral student of mine, so I helped him with his doctoral dissertation work. And he created an amazing, did amazing statistical analysis on leadership and cultures. So we wanted to take the work that I had done, work that he had done. I did most of my work in understanding teams and management and leadership. how to get into flow, how to create really high motivating environments. So we started putting the book together, an academic book, but I mean, it was just so boring that we didn't even want to read it. So I said, Hey, let's just do something fun. And we both found out that our, one of our favorite movies and books was the wizard of Oz. So we decided we were going to write, if you can see it here, a book called the leader of Oz, you know? So we took the, Speaker 1 (5:38) We took the story of the Wizard of Oz and wrote a business parable. Business parables have been pretty popular. So he wrote this about the company in Kansas that gets whisked away and dropped into Silicon Valley. And you have the wicked VP from the East and the wicked VP from the West. So we made it fun, but it's very academically grounded. It's really all of the doctoral work that we had done matched with the designs. that I was able to influence at Intel. So it's a great roadmap if somebody wants to create a very, very high performing team and do it in a way, you know, a lot of companies have purchased, you know, a dozen or two books and they do it as a kind of a lunch and learn type of thing. Or we have a... a system and a program that we can go and help people do that as well. But it's kind of a fun, easy way to get people to understand simple ways that you can do it, by the way, and cost you no money, right, that you can do to build a good team. So that was the first book that we had done. And it's done quite well. We've finished our second printing. And I'm almost out, so we're debating on whether we do a third printing or not. Speaker 3 (7:01) Well, if it's working for you, and I love the title and the parables. That brings power. The power of story is what draws people in. If it's another dry academic book, it's like, oh gosh, that reminds me of my days at the university, and I'll get around to it when I have to. Versus this sounds fun. You incorporated fun and fantasy and childlike curiosity. How are they incorporating the yellow brick road into this? And I use the parable of the yellow brick road a lot in my speaking. I say, let's walk down the gold brick road to prophets. Speaker 1 (7:41) Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the other thing that we did in the book is that at the end of each chapter. There is what we call marvelous leadership secrets. Anyone that reads the book, you'd understand why we called it that. And there's usually five or six questions that you answer. It says, you know, do