- Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) CEO Lisa Su says hard work and training are keys to the chipmaker’s impressive turnaround. She was recently named Time‘s CEO of the year.
As businesses around the world embrace a four-day week and “the right to disconnect”, Lisa Su, the CEO of chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), is going against the grain and asking some staff to show up on Saturdays.
When the 55-year-old took AMD’s reins in 2014, it was far from the $201 billion company it is today. At the time, its stock was trading around $3 per share and, according to Time, the indebted firm had just resorted to cutting about 25% of its staff and selling its Austin office.
But under Su’s helm, the company has experienced an impressive turnaround and become one of the world’s top chipmakers, competing with the likes of Intel and Nvidia. Its stock now trades at around $125 per share, and her net worth has ballooned along with it—a 120% rise in AMD’s share price this year pushed Su into Forbes’ billionaire list for the first time.
Last week, the Fortune 500 chief was named Time’s CEO of the Year for 2024. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s an achievement that demands relentless effort—not only from Su, but also from her team.
As confirmed to Fortune, the publication revealed that the CEO holds weekend meetings with her senior team.
“People are really motivated by ambitious goals,” she told Time. “The previous strategy of, hey, let’s just do a little bit better here and there—that’s actually less motivational.”
“I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she added, before reportingly heading into a strategy meeting and urging her executives “to move faster and delegate more.”
The profile also suggested that Su calls managers in the morning to discuss memos she sent them after midnight, however, an AMD spokesperson told Fortune that “the specific anecdote was related to a pre-read that was distributed to her very late the evening prior for an early morning meeting.”
“Lisa provided feedback on which specific parts of the lengthy slide presentation the team should focus on in order to have a productive discussion,” the spokesperson added.
After-hours work: encouraged by some CEOs, despised by Gen Z and millennials
Of course, Su is not the only CEO who contacts staff in the evenings or weekends.
Daksh Gupta, the 22-year-old at the helm of AI software startup Greptile has made it crystal clear that work-life balance is a myth at his company—so clear, in fact, that he’s spelled it out in an online job description.
“Recently I started telling candidates right in the first interview that Greptile offers no work-life-balance, typical workdays start at 9am and end at 11pm, often later, and we work Saturdays, sometimes also Sundays,” Gupta wrote on X last month.. “I emphasize the environment is high stress, and there is no tolerance for poor work.”
“We work extremely long hours because we’re trying to outwork our competition,” he told Fortune.
And then there’s Elon Musk, who is perhaps the loudest proponent of burning the midnight oil. After taking over Twitter, now X, he emailed his new employees (in the middle of the night, no less) demanding they work “long hours at high intensity.”
Soon after, he praised Shanghai employees for meeting him near midnight while blasting the U.S. “laptop class” for working from home. Of course, he’s no stranger himself to sleeping overnight at the Tesla factory.
However, it’s well known that for young workers today, having a life outside of work is just as important (if not more so) as building a career.
Research has consistently shown that this generation will turn down offers from employers who don’t align with their values and walk out of jobs that don’t grant them the flexibility they desire. They would even rather work multiple jobs than one with traditional rigid hours, to better accommodate their out-of-work passions.
Before shooting out a meeting invite to staff on a Saturday, bosses beware: 1 in 4 millennial workers would quit their jobs over a single out-of-hours demand from their boss.
