Andy Grove Quotes

#1. But like the best empire builders, he was both very determined and very skeptical. It's like [former Intel CEO] Andy Grove says, 'only the paranoid survive.

David Kirkpatrick

#2. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#5. How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#7. Activity is not output.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#9. A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#11. There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

Andy Grove

#12. 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.

Andy Grove

#13. Pickups, S.U.V.'s, vans and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting those should be our first priority.

Andy Grove

#14. 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.

Andy Grove

#15. Growth is kinda built into everyone's genes. It's built into management's genes, the salesman's genes, the investors' desires. People expect companies to grow.

Andy Grove

#16. 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.

Andy Grove

#17. You need just the right amount of ambition ... If you have too little ambition, you don't push or work hard. If you have too much ambition, you put yourself ahead of others, elbow them out of your way.

Andy Grove

#18. 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.

Andy Grove

#19. PCMCIA - People can't memorize computer industries acronyms

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#21. Assume any career move you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.

Andy Grove

#22. So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I'll take the turbulent one.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#24. I don't see Merced appearing on a mainstream desktop inside of a decade.

Andy Grove

#25. 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.

Andy Grove

#26. 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.

Andy Grove

#27. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#29. There are two options: adapt or die.

Andy Grove

#30. You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.

Andy Grove

#31. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#33. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#35. By the late '90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.

Andy Grove

#36. Every generation thinks that they invented sex.

Andy Grove

#37. I was glad I liked chemistry.

Andy Grove

#38. Whatever success we have had in maintaining our culture has been instrumental in Intel's success in surviving strategic inflection points.

Andy Grove

#39. 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.

Andy Grove

#40. 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.

Andy Grove

#41. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#43. Competition is warfare. Mostly it is played by prescribed rules
there is a sort of Geneva Convention for competition
but it's thorough and often brutal.

Andy Grove

#44. Think about it. Right now, a whole generation of young (customers) in the United States has been brought up to take computers for granted. Pointing a mouse is no more mysterious to them than hitting the "on" button on the television is to their parents.

Andy Grove

#45. I did not want to become a poster child for yet another disease.

Andy Grove

#46. I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#49. 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?

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#52. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#54. Make mistakes faster.

Andy Grove

#55. E-Commerce is happening the way all the hype said it would. Internet deployment is happening. Broadband is happening. Everything we ever said about the Internet is happening. And it is very, very early. We can't even glimpse it's potential in changing the way people work and live.

Andy Grove

#56. A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal.

Andy Grove

#57. 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.

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#59. I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

Andy Grove

#60. 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

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

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

Andy Grove

#63. Detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest stage possible.

Andy Grove