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In front of the restaurant\u2019s dozen or more cash registers, customers were standing six or seven deep when Brice Hill raised his voice and began instructing the hungry mall shoppers to immediately exit the store.

\u201cNo one listened to a single word I said,\u201d says Hill, who opens our discussion by transporting us back to the mid-1980s, when as a teenage recent graduate of McDonald\u2019s management training program he was given a surprise leadership test.

Having made a trip to the mall for some holiday shopping, Hill had poked his head into the mall\u2019s marquee McDonald\u2019s only to find a few of his fellow managers nervously waiting for a return call from McDonald\u2019s headquarters.

The restaurant\u2014at the time one of the busiest McDonald\u2019s locations on the West Coast\u2014had only minutes earlier received a bomb threat, and as Hill digested the blank stares triggered by his shouts to clear the store, he realized that more extreme measures were required.

Leaving the customers in their queues, the young manager dodged the doubtful stares of employees as he maneuvered his way to the back of the store, where he found the location\u2019s electricity source and without hesitation cut it off.

\u201cThey had told me that 20 minutes was the countdown on the thing\u2014we cleared the whole place with only 4 minutes to spare,\u201d recalls Hill, who estimates that the location may have held as many as 500 customers and workers that day.

Later, police would determine that there had been no bomb, but this has never led Hill to second-guess his actions.

\u201cWhen you\u2019re in that type of situation, you have to be able to act and act like an owner. Even if you don\u2019t know whether you have the right answer, you have to act. There cannot be a void of leadership,\u201d says Hill, underscoring what might be a recurring theme for his career.

Fast-forward a few decades, and Hill is a senior strategic planning executive at Intel Corp. The venue is an Arizona conference room where a group of Intel executives\u2014including the company\u2019s CFO\u2014has gathered to hear Hill offer an analysis that could potentially lead Intel to begin building idle factories.

This time, the doubtful stares quickly turned to dissenting voices as Hill\u2019s strategic analysis failed to win over many of his Intel colleagues. \xa0

\u201cWhen I made the recommendation that we should build an idle factory, there was like a melee in the room. All of the CFO staff was arguing, waving their hands, debating different opinions,\u201d explains Hill, who says that in the minds of traditional finance executives, an idle building equals excess cost. To highlight his point Hill repeats the refrain of \u201cYou have to heat it, cool it, and guard it!\u201d

Still, what Hill\u2019s analysis had begun to spotlight was the cost of missing out on growth opportunities in a business wielding 60% to 70% gross margins. Suddenly, having idle factories in place to add additional capacity when growth demanded seemed to have merit.

\u201cAt the end, the CFO said, \u2018Bryce, I want you to go meet with the treasury staff. They\u2019re experts in derivatives and option modeling. I want you to go see if your math holds up,\u2019\u201d remembers Hill, whose analysis received \u201ca clean bill of health\u201d from treasury before getting a thumbs-up from Intel\u2019s CEO, a\xa0final affirmation that led Intel to modify its growth strategy as well as its accounting. Going forward expenses associated with serving the idle factories would be listed as strategic investments rather than costs \u2013 a change that has perhaps made management think twice before turning off the lights .\xa0\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0