Andrew S. Grove Quotes

How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader.

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

You can be the subject of a strategic inflection point but you can also be the cause of one

I can't help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. I guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set an unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really tests the mettle of the leader. By contrast, it doesn't take much self-confidence to downsize a company - after all, how can you go wrong by shuttering factories and laying people off if the benefits of such actions are going to show up in tomorrow's bottom line and will be applauded by the financial community?

we confused the manager's general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.

The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.

The key to survival is to learn to add more value - and

Adapt or die. Some

if you're wrong, you will die. But most companies don't die because they are wrong; most die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in Standing still

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change

A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

When people in the company start asking questions like @But how can we say "X" when we do "Y"? more than anything else this is a tip-off that a strategic inflection point may very well be in the making

Business success contains the seeds of its destruction.

Businesses fail either because they leave their customers or because their customer leave them !

This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction.

People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early

strategic changes doesn't just start at the top. It starts with your calender

What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting - a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please

This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The

During the 1920s the market for automobiles changed slowly and subtly. Henry Ford's slogan for the Model T - "It takes you there and brings you back" - epitomized the original attraction of the car as a mode of basic transportation. In 1921, more than half of all cars sold in the United States were Fords. But

While the story is unique to Intel, the lessons, I believe, are universal

It's harder to be the best of class in several fields than in just one

The person who is the star of previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.

If you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself

First, when a strategic inflection point sweeps through the industry, the more successful a participant was in the old industry structure, the more threatened it is by change and the more reluctant it is to adapt to it. Second, whereas the cost to enter a given industry in the face of well-entrenched participants can be very high, when the structure breaks, the cost to enter may become trivially small, giving rise to Compaqs, Dells and Novells, each of which emerged from practically nothing to become major corporations. What's common among these companies is that they all instinctively followed the rules for success in a horizontal industry.

Remember that by saying "yes" - to projects, a course of action, or whatever - you are implicitly saying "no" to something else.

In short, strategic inflection points are about fundamental change in any business, technological or not

As we throw ourselves into raw actions, our senses and instincts will rapidly be honed again

The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up an listen

There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.

In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry.

a big part of a middle manager's work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible. The

Turning the workplace into a playing field can turn our subordinates into "athletes" dedicated to performing at the limit of their capabilities - the key to making our team consistent winners.