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Fujio Masuoka says that Toshiba tried to demote him after he invented a $76 billion product. The loss was America's gain. Will Japan make the same mistake with the next innovation?

"Any study of the history of Silicon Valley should start with a magazine article by perhaps the greatest literary journalist of our time, Tom Wolfe. In this 1983 Esquire piece, Wolfe offers a highly engaging profile of the charismatic founder of Intel and tells the story of the founding of the computer chip business. It's a terrific tale: A group of young geniuses, many still in their 20s, follow the great Bell Labs engineer and transistor inventor William Shockley to start Shockley Transistor. Soon frustrated with the controlling and self-centered leader, a group of them, led by Noyce, persuade a sleepy East Coast camera company to underwrite them, and dump Shockley to start Fairchild Semiconductor, which later gave birth to Intel, AMD, LSI Logic, and most of the rest of the chip business. In the style of The Right Stuff, Wolfe captures the spirit and culture of Noyce and his crowd in a way that's never been equaled, and is as good a read today as it was 25 years ago." -- Jonathan Weber, strategy+business