Quotes from Andrew S. Grove

Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.

a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. that change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end

To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.

While the story is unique to Intel, the lessons, I believe, are universal

If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider's intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That's what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job.

The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up an listen

The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.

At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off. But what is really being influenced here? It is the next year—and only the next year.

Admitting that you need to learn something new is always difficult. It is even harder if you are a senior manager who is accustomed to the automatic deference which people accord you owing to your position. But if you don't fight it, that very deference may become a wall that isolates you from learning new things. It all takes self-discipline.

The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.

we confused the manager's general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.

Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?

The implication was that either the people in the room needed to change their areas of knowledge and expertise or people themselves needed to be changed

Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

delegation without follow-through is abdication.

The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.

The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and

The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.

Compaqs, Dells and Novells each of which emerged from practically nothing to become major corporations. What's the common among these companies is that they all instinctively followed the rules for success in a horizontal industry.

Once someone's source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.

The value system at Intel is completely the reverse. The Ph.D. in computer science who knows an answer in the abstract, yet does not apply it to create some tangible output, gets little recognition, but a junior engineer who produces results is highly valued and esteemed. And that is how it should be.

if you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself

Except for one last thing. What if the people who believe in the cheap Internet appliance turn out to be right?

All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.