Andy Grove

"Andy Grove made clear, is it the place to stop: You know, in our business we have to set ourselves uncomfortably tough objectives, and then we have to meet them. And then after ten milliseconds of celebration we have to set ourselves another [set of] highly difficult-to-reach objectives and we have to meet them. And the reward of having met one of these challenging goals is that you get to play again."

"The qualities prized by Andy Grove—collective accountability, fearless risk taking, measurable achievement—are also highly esteemed at Google. In Project Aristotle, an internal Google study of 180 teams, standout performance correlated to affirmative responses to these five questions: Structure and clarity: Are goals, roles, and execution plans on our team clear? Psychological safety: Can we take risks on this team without feeling insecure or embarrassed? Meaning of work: Are we working on something that is personally important for each of us? Dependability: Can we count on each other to do high-quality work on time? Impact of work: Do we fundamentally believe that the work we’re doing matters?"

"Andy Grove understood the paramount importance of this interplay. “Put simply,” he wrote in High Output Management, culture is “a set of values and beliefs, as well as familiarity with the way things are done and should be done in a company. The point is that a strong and positive corporate culture is absolutely essential.”"

"The American imagination has been too focused on the creation of tooling and blueprints. [Andy Grove, the legendary former CEO of Intel](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor369), said it best in 2010: that the United States needs to focus less on “the mythical moment of creation” and more on the “scaling up” of products. Grove saw Silicon Valley transition from doing both invention and production to specializing only in the former. And he understood quite well that technology ecosystems would rust if the research and development no longer had a learning loop from the production process."

"Examining Intel through this lens, we can identify a large-scale market (M0g) for both memories and microprocessors. So what accounted for the utterly different value outcome? Under Andy Grove, operational excellence was the norm, so it was Power that made the difference: over time competitive arbitrage drove m in…"

"To Balsillie, meetings were corporate theater. You had to memorize your part before the curtain rose. Usually, Balsillie was the leading man, but he was willing to take on any role his team required for customer meetings. He could play the flinty, ice-veined negotiator or maintain a quiet presence, depending on what was needed. Tyler Nelson, who led several key business development initiatives after being hired by Balsillie in mid-1998, says: “Jim would say, ‘If you bring me into a meeting, use me for effect. What do you want me to do?’—but you had to make sure he was 100 percent [onside]. If not, a meeting could go sideways fast.” Once Balsillie approved a meeting agenda, everyone on his team was instructed to stick to the script. “I hate being thrown off by others in a meeting,” Balsillie says. “I get edgy when people are not prepared.” Even though Intel was a RIM partner, Balsillie was wary. You could never be certain of any customer, supplier, or competitor. Meetings were a potential minefield. “You learn quickly that this is serious business,” Balsillie says, “and you don’t make an independent move unless you know all aspects of the plan and exactly what you’re doing, because the penalty for a misstep is severe.” Overprepared and inexperienced, Klimstra knew his role: to answer technical questions. Otherwise, Balsillie had told him, say nothing. While Klimstra viewed Intel as a friendly ally, RIM’s chief saw the semiconductor giant as a dangerous, tricky heavyweight whose every employee lived by former CEO Andy Grove’s mantra, “Only the paranoid survive.”"

"With no regulatory oversight of what was happening, a shift in where all this work was being performed was inevitable. The cofounder of Intel, Andy Grove, would later diagnose the problem as “a general undervaluing of manufacturing—the idea that as long as ‘knowledge work’ stays in the US, it doesn’t matter what happens to factory jobs.” But as Grove warned: “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.”"