James C. Morgan will be a special guest presenter during the SEMICON West keynote session this morning at the Yerba Buena Center. Morgan is a director emeritus and past president of SEMI, and was one of SEMI’s early supporters, back when the organization consisted of an “executive secretary, two clerks, and eight board members.”

Jim will be discussing the semiconductor equipment industry and introducing his autobiography and book of business insights, Applied Wisdom: Bad News Is Good News and Other Insights That Can Help Anyone Be a Better Manager. Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, says that he would “definitely put this book on the shelf next to Andy Grove’s Only the Paranoid Survive.”

Complimentary copies of the ebook will be made available to all attendees of this year’s Semicon West conference.

Jim Morgan will also be signing paperback books at booth 5630 in the North Hall at Moscone Center on June 11 and 12.

James C. Morgan ran Applied Materials for nearly three decades—one of the longest tenures of any Fortune 500 CEO. The company was near-bankrupt when he joined; when he retired as CEO in 2003, Applied was a multi-billion dollar global leader with more than 15,000 employees.

More recently he and his wife Becky founded the Northern Sierra Partnership, which fosters collaboration among conservation organizations in order to preserve and restore one of the world’s great mountain ranges.