Intel’s legendary co-founder and former CEO Andrew S. Grove was born on 2 September 1936. His life is the stuff of legend – a poor immigrant from Hungary who survived both the Nazi and the communist regimes in Hungary, but after the Soviet Unioncrushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he fled, first to Austria and then to the United States.
He attended the City College of New York while working at a restaurant, obtaining a B.S. degree in chemical engineering in 1960. In 1963 Grove received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.
He was one of the founders and the CEO of Intel, helping transform the company into the world's largest manufacturer of semiconductors.
Here's a collection of Andy's quotes that will make you think.
"You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them."
"You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die."
"We're in the early stages of recasting our commercial lives, our professional lives, our health practices, everything."
"There's never enough time."
"The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere."
"The most powerful tool of all is the word ‘no.’"
"The lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change."
"The greatest danger is in standing still."
"The ability to recognise that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat in crucial to the future of an enterprise."
"Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers."
"Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?"
"Take a bit of the future and make it your present."
"If you are a founder of a business, you understand the business implicitly. You understand it through your skin."
"I tend to believe Mark Twain hit it on the head when he said, “Put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.”
"I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really."
"I believe in the value of paranoia. 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 and then another until there is nothing left."
"How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood."
"Businesses fail either because they leave their customers or because their customer leave them!"
"Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them."
"A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done."
"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."
"The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand."
"Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster."
"I really don't have much respect for the people who live their lives motivated by an exit strategy existing, being performed. There was no option that we were trained in that says, 'If it gets too hard, get up and leave.'"
So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I'll take the turbulent one."
"It's not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can't run your family like a company. It doesn't work."
"Growth is kinda built into everyone's genes. It's built into management's genes, the salesman's genes, the investors' desires. People expect companies to grow."
"Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age."
"Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution."
"Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive."
