Andy Grove Quotes

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

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

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

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.

There are two options: adapt or die.

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

Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.

Activity is not output.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Make mistakes faster.

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

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.

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

There's a tendency at the senior and middle-manager level to be too big-picturish and too superficial. There is a phrase, "The devil is in the details." One can formulate brilliant global strategies whose executability is zero. It's only through familiarity with details - the capability of the individuals who have to execute, the marketplace, the timing - that a good strategy emerges. I like to work from details to big pictures.

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.

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.

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