Andrew S. Grove Quotes & Sayings

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. — Andrew S. Grove

This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The — Andrew S. Grove

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? — Andrew S. Grove

Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not. — Andrew S. Grove

Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful. — Andrew S. Grove

A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence. — Andrew S. Grove

The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways. — Andrew S. Grove

Don't differentiate without a difference. — Andrew S. Grove

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change — Andrew S. Grove

If you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself — Andrew S. Grove

This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction. — Andrew S. Grove

What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting - a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please — Andrew S. Grove

Of course, you can't spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly. — Andrew S. Grove

How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader. — Andrew S. Grove

In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process. — Andrew S. Grove

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

"This compound should be available from most good drugstores." I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently ... In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule. — Andrew S. Grove

In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry. — Andrew S. Grove

Adapt or die. Some — Andrew S. Grove

The absolute truth is that if you don't know what you want, you won't get it. — Andrew S. Grove

Turning the workplace into a playing field can turn our subordinates into "athletes" dedicated to performing at the limit of their capabilities - the key to making our team consistent winners. — Andrew S. Grove

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. — Andrew S. Grove

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. — Andrew S. Grove

The key to survival is to learn to add more value - and — Andrew S. Grove

But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this. — Andrew S. Grove

I think, by applying our production principles. First, we must identify our limiting step: what is the "egg" in our work? — Andrew S. Grove

delegation without follow-through is abdication. — Andrew S. Grove

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form. — Andrew S. Grove

During the 1920s the market for automobiles changed slowly and subtly. Henry Ford's slogan for the Model T - "It takes you there and brings you back" - epitomized the original attraction of the car as a mode of basic transportation. In 1921, more than half of all cars sold in the United States were Fords. But — Andrew S. Grove

a big part of a middle manager's work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible. The — Andrew S. Grove

There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity. — Andrew S. Grove

Business success contains the seeds of its destruction. — Andrew S. Grove

Remember that by saying "yes" - to projects, a course of action, or whatever - you are implicitly saying "no" to something else. — Andrew S. Grove

First, when a strategic inflection point sweeps through the industry, the more successful a participant was in the old industry structure, the more threatened it is by change and the more reluctant it is to adapt to it. Second, whereas the cost to enter a given industry in the face of well-entrenched participants can be very high, when the structure breaks, the cost to enter may become trivially small, giving rise to Compaqs, Dells and Novells, each of which emerged from practically nothing to become major corporations. What's common among these companies is that they all instinctively followed the rules for success in a horizontal industry. — Andrew S. Grove

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 — Andrew S. Grove

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. — Andrew S. Grove