Andy Grove Quotes - Page 2

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.

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.

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.

PCMCIA - People can't memorize computer industries acronyms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Only the paranoid survive.

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.

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.

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

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?

Every generation thinks that they invented sex.

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.

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

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

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

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

In the first round of work simplification...you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction...To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical ordains it.