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"This is the definitive biography of the enigmatic and highly respected business legend. Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel during its years of explosive growth, is on the shortlist of America's most admired business people...
Born a Hungarian Jew in 1936, Andras Istvan Grof survived the Nazis only to face the Soviet invasion of his country. He fled to America at age 20, studied engineering, and arrived in Silicon Valley just in time for a historic opportunity. He became the third employee of Intel, working for the legendary Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. This is an inspiring biography that will enthral anyone who cares about technology or leadership."
and an interesting page from the author:
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/for...63124/index.htm
"Intel kept denying the cliff ahead until its profits went over the edge, plummeting from $198 million in 1984 to less than $2 million in 1985. It was in the middle of this crisis, when many managers would have obsessed about specifics, that Grove stepped outside himself. He and Moore had been agonizing over their dilemma for weeks, he recounts in Only the Paranoid Survive, when something happened: "I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance when I turned back to Gordon, and I asked, 'If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?' Gordon answered without hesitation, 'He would get us out of memories.' I stared at him, numb, then said, 'Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?'"
The words "I stared at him, numb" suggest that in the crucial moment, Andy ceased to be Andy. Instead he was Dr. Grove the engineer, the teacher, looking down at his own case study. And from this realm of pure reason he could see that Intel's present course had an obvious ending: disaster. It was a cognitive tour de force, yet within moments Andy Grove the executive returned--and was dismayed by what Andy Grove the teacher had concluded. Professors overturn ideas, but they don't upend lives. "To be completely honest about it," Grove wrote, "as I started to discuss the possibility of getting out of the memory chip business, I had a hard time getting the words out of my mouth without equivocation." One of his managers even persuaded him "to continue R&D for a product that he and I both knew we had no plans to sell." Grove's devotion to reason did not mean that he was a machine. Far from it. What he found in the end was the will to do what was painful, the will to let go.
"Welcome to the new Intel," Grove said in a speech not long afterward, to rally the troops behind the decision to exit memories. Intel the memory company was dead, he explained, but there was another product on which it could stake its future: the microprocessor. Invented at Intel in 1971, it had spent the 1970s timing traffic lights and helping bacon packers slice their bacon into even strips. Not all that exciting. continued
But once IBM chose Intel's microprocessor to be the chip at the heart of its PCs, demand began to explode. Even so, the shift from memory chips was brutally hard--in 1986, Intel fired some 8,000 people and lost more than $180 million on $1.3 billion in sales--the only loss the company has ever posted since its early days as a startup."
i love this stuff
