Andy Grove

“He researched 22 different companies, dividing them into two categories, jobs for which he was qualified but uninterested, and those that interested him but where he might be underqualified.”

“The true genius of leadership lies in recognizing when incremental improvements become futile and when you must abandon the very business that made you successful, the golden goose, if you will, even while it's still generating enormous profits.”

“Top executives are often the last to recognize the fundamental shifts because they're insulated from market realities and emotionally invested in the status quo. Middle managers, by contrast, operate at the intersection of the company and the outside world. Th…”

“At Intel, Grove created forums where middle managers' voices could be heard and respected regardless of hierarchy.”

“While others sought to duplicate their strengths in founding teams, Grove recognized that more and noise needed someone fundamentally different from themselves. They had vision, they had technical credibility, but what they lacked was operational discipline.”

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business, and then another chunk, until there's nothing left. I believe that the prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constan…”

“You can tell you're going through a strategic inflection point if the way you traditionally have done business no longer delivers the kind of results that we used to get. Well, the new way of doing business involves so much uncertainty that you can't easily br…”

“The complexity of manufacturing the 11 oh three made it nearly impossible for competitors to reverse engineer, giving Intel a multi-year advantage in the market. In effect, complicated manufacturing became their core skill.”

“The formal decision-making process is usually the only protective covering for a much simpler informal process.”

“Silicon Valley had technical brilliance, but lacked organizational discipline. Precisely the gap that Grove, with his Eastern European understanding that systems mattered as much as individual genius, was uniquely positioned to fill.”

“If you're running an organization or you're senior level in an organization, your ceiling is determined by the talent you attract, not the talent you possess.”

“The best person to worry about product quality first is the designer. As the product goes into manufacturing and the designer takes on a new product design, he loses interest. A third independent body should take over the quality control function from the engi…”

“As Andy would later observe, people who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner.”

“The persistent problem nobody else wants to tackle eventually find their permanent home with the person willing to solve them.”

“The greatest business failures often come from not playing the game poorly, but from continuing to excel at games that no longer matter.”

“It's not literally true, because the paranoid are delusional, ok? And they could, they see everything as a crazy threat, and they can't differentiate what's an important threat, and what's not, and what's reality, ok?”