Organic collaboration

Gulf Coast technology executive Dan Clarke, an engineer and the youngest of 10 kids who grew up on a northeast Ohio farm, is used to being a tad different.

Like the time in the early 1980s when he was part of a team at Intel that worked on something called a laptop computer. Intel's old guard looked down at the young laptop team, recalls Clarke. They called them “crazy kids.”

Clarke worked at Intel for seven years. He ultimately ran two departments, including the video components group, a $75 million unit. And the biggest business lesson he learned from the $53 billion semiconductor chip manufacturer, a guiding principle he still uses today, is laptop-like contrarian.