Andy Grove RIP!
There have been numerous appraisals in the last week about the life of Andy Grove, founder and former CEO of Intel. The Wall Street Journal’s piece by Michael Malone is particularly good: The Lion of Silicon Valley.
Grove truly was a colossus in the tech community and an amazing business leader.
Grove’s famous dictum (and title of his autobiography) -“Only the Paranoid Survive”- has always felt like a lodestar of sorts for those of us in the strategy and competitive analysis game. If only we could get our leaders to look over their shoulder and expect rivals to come after them.
Sadly the construction is freighted with tones of fear and isolation … and certainly Grove meant some of this. But I think his example and that of Intel is actually more liberating. If business leaders -really all leaders- could be more systematically open to the possibilities of disruption and change, engaged intellectually in how things can (and probably will) go awry, then they can more effectively be the agents of change.
It takes guts. In practice, Grove courageously changed the path Intel was headed down more than a few times. He attacked change, wallowed in it, tried to look inside it; and once he figured out where to go, it was full speed ahead.
Operate like Andy Grove and it is unlikely you’ll get beaten!