Andy Grove Quotes

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.

Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.

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.

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.

How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood.

You have to understand what it is that you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.

A question that often comes up at times of strategic transformation is, should you pursue a highly focused approach, betting everything on one strategic goal, or should you hedge? ... Mark Twain hit it on the head when he said, Put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.

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.

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.

If the brutal facts are not faced by leaders, the brutal reality sets in.

The worse the news, the more effort should go into communicating it.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.

Only the paranoid survive.

I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly.

Make mistakes faster.

Accept that no matter where you go to work, you are not an employee you are a business with one employee, you. Nobody owes you a career. You own it, as a sole proprietor.

Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn't let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.

Activity is not output.

You need to plan the way a fire department plans: it cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

The future is going to take care of itself, like it always has.

Long distances used to be a moat that both insulated and isolated people from workers on the other side of the world. But every day, technology narrows that moat inch by inch. Every person in the world is on the verge of becoming both a coworker and a competitor to every one of us ... Technological change is going to reach out and sooner or later change something fundamental in your business world.

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change

There are two options: adapt or die.

Most Americans probably aren't aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed.

If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry

Every generation thinks that they invented sex.

With all due respect to Microsoft and Intel, there is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time.

Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.

Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line.

The most important role of managers is to create environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in marketplace.

The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.

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.

You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.

I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet.

Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age.

The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example.

PCMCIA - People can't memorize computer industries acronyms

What kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work - and masses of unemployed?

I was glad I liked chemistry.

No problem is so complicated that you cannot make it more complicated.

Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.

The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand.

Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.

Girls don't think boys' games are too hard, they think they are stupid.

Investment decisions and personal decisions don't wait for the picture to be clarified.