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Andrew Grove

Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer and author (1936–2016)

Andrew Stephen Grove (born András István Gróf; September 2, 1936—March 21, 2016) was a Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author, known as former president, CEO, and chairman of the board of Intel Corporation.

Andy Grove in 1997

Quotes

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1980s - 1990s

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  • Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn't let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.
    • In: Computer Decisions Vol. 16 (1984). p. 126
  • When I came to Intel, I was scared to death. I left a very secure job where I knew what I was doing and started running R&D for a brand new venture in untried territory. It was terrifying.
 
Andy Grove, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore (1978)
  • Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.
    • Andy Grove, December 1994; cited in: Albert Yu (1998) Creating the digital future. p. 93 : After the Pentium Processor flaw in December 1994
  • In various bits and pieces, we have steered Intel from a start-up to one of the central companies of the information economy.
  • Your career is your business, and you are its CEO.
    • Andrew Grove (1999) cited in: George M. Dupuy, ‎David H. Dupuy (2004) Career preparation: a transition guide for students. p. 4

High Output Management (1983)

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A. S. Grove (1983/1995). High Output Management. Random House. ISBN 0-679-76288-4.

  • You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double the efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I'm advocating is — Let chaos reign, then rein chaos. Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events.
    • 1995, p. 229; As cited in: Cristina Chaminade, ‎Bino Catasús (2007) Intellectual Capital Revisited: Paradoxes in the Knowledge Intensive Organization.. p. 94
  • You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.
    • 1995, p. 229; As cited in: Jay W. Rojews (2004) International Perspectives on Workforce Education and Development. p. xi

New millennium

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  • A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.
  • Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.
  • A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.
    • Attributed to Andy Grove in: Ciarán Parker (2006) The Thinkers 50: The World's Most Influential Business. p. 70
  • Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
    • Attributed to Andrew S. Grove in: William J. Baumol et al (2007) Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth. p. 228
  • Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we don't just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.
  • All of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.

Swimming Across: a Memoir, 2001

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Grove, Andrew S. Swimming Across: a Memoir, Hachette Book Group (2001)

  • By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. . . [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.
    • Prologue: Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs.

Harvard Business School Press conference, 2002

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Andy Grove interviewed by Clayton M. Christensen, Harvard Business School Press conference, October 3, 2002.

  • I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly
    • Cited in: Roger Martin, ‎Karen Christensen (2013) Rotman on Design. p. 213
  • And try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing.

AP Interview: Ex-Intel head pushes electric cars, 2008

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Andy Grove in Associated Press interview by Ken Thomas, June 27, 2008; Cited in: "Ex-Intel head Grove: Electric transportation 'has to be done'." satoday30.usatoday.com By Ken Thomas, Associated Press. Posted 6/30/2008

  • The drumbeat of the electrical transportation is accelerating like nothing I've ever seen in my life.
  • The personal computer... went to individuals first before it went to corporations... The corporations are sitting, wishing this whole friggin' thing [Electric cars] to go away. Which is exactly what the computer companies' attitude was to personal computers.

Quotes about Andrew Grove

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  • He combined the analytic approach of a scientist with an ability to engage others in honest and deep conversation, which sustained Intel's success over a period that saw the rise of the personal computer, the internet and Silicon Valley.
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