Andy Grove in 2000: ‘What I’ve Learned’
A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman:
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell
you different.
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them.
You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake
again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and
the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar
mistake.
Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who
make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash
machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address,
because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight
the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.
Grove, still serving as CEO during Intel’s zenith in 1997, didn’t even have an office. He worked out of an 8×9-foot cubicle.
What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an
industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew
up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that
many of us have spent in business before this time are of only
limited relevance.
This industry is not like any other. Computers don’t get incrementally more powerful; they get exponentially more powerful.
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A few nuggets of wisdom from Andy Grove, in an interview with Esquire after he retired as Intel’s CEO, but still served as chairman:
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell
you different.
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them.
You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake
again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and
the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar
mistake.
Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who
make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash
machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address,
because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight
the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.
Grove, still serving as CEO during Intel’s zenith in 1997, didn’t even have an office. He worked out of an 8×9-foot cubicle.
What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an
industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew
up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that
many of us have spent in business before this time are of only
limited relevance.
This industry is not like any other. Computers don’t get incrementally more powerful; they get exponentially more powerful.