“Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.”
And
“Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.”
And
“So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I’ll take the turbulent one.”
And
“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.”
And
“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.”
And
“A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.”
And
“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.”
And
“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.”
And
“Stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
And
“Our biggest competition in achieving our ambitions, … is a television set.”
And
“Technology happens, it’s not good, it’s not bad. Is steel good or bad?”
And
“Your career is your business, and you are its CEO.”
And
“The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change”
And
“Strategic changes doesn’t just start at the top. It starts with your calender”
And
“The person who is the star of previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.”
And
“If you’re wrong, you will die. But most companies don’t die because they are wrong; most die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in Standing still”
And
“Selectivity – the determination to choose what we will attempt to get done and what we won’t – is the only way out of the panic that excessive demands on our time can create.”
And
“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”
And
“People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early”
And
“It’s harder to be the best of class in several fields than in just one”
And
“How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?”
And
“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”
And
“As we throw ourselves into raw actions, our senses and instincts will rapidly be honed again”
And
“Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”
And
“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.”
And
“You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double the efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I’m advocating is — Let chaos reign, then rein chaos. Does that mean that you shouldn’t plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events.”
And
“You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.”
And
“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”
And
Avoid random motion.
And
Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
And
Satisfaction doesn’t come in moments but in periods of time.
And
Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age. At the heart of the Internet culture is a force that wants to find out everything about you. And once it has found out everything about you and two hundred million others, that’s a very valuable asset, and people will be tempted to trade and do commerce with that asset. This wasn’t the information that people were thinking of when they called this the information age.
And
Take a bit of the future and make it your present.
And
We’re living the Next Big Thing. It’s a little like living in the time when electricity was in its early stages. It took decades for electricity to change the landscape. We’re in the early stages of recasting our commercial lives, our professional lives, our health practices, everything.
And
Profits are the lifeblood of enterprise. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
And
You must understand your mistakes. Study the hell out of them. You’re not going to have the chance of making the same mistake again — you can’t step into the river again at the same place and the same time — but you will have the chance of making a similar mistake.
And
Status is a very dangerous thing. I’ve met too many people who make it a point of pride that they never take money out of a cash machine, people who are too good to have their own e-mail address, because that’s for everybody else but not them. It’s hard to fight the temptation to set yourself apart from the rest of the world.
And
What you’re seeing today is a very, very rapid evolution of an industry where the milieu is better understood by people who grew up in the same time frame as the industry. A lot of the years that many of us have spent in business before this time are of only limited relevance.
And
Risk is the cost of aggressive objectives.
And
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.
And
Assume any career moves you make won’t go smoothly. They won’t. But don’t look back.
And
Technology is both an end in itself and a means to other ends. When you figure something out and make it work, there is pleasure and excitement. Not just because the technology is going to do something, but because you created something with its own inherent beauty, like art, like literature, like music.
And
Denial can blind.
And
It is a very important truism that immigrants and immigration are what made America what it is. We must be vigilant as a nation to have a tolerance for differences, a tolerance for new people.
And
When you have cancer, there’s always a finite chance that it will recur, so talking about the whole experience in past tense is a little presumptuous. So yes, I have faced the prospect of dying, of having a specific cause of mortality hanging over my head for the rest of my life. But I don’t think the experience changed me, not that either I or anyone close to me has been able to spot.
And
All art is in some fashion escape. It sucks you out of your own life. It absorbs you.
And
Retirement is a process. You have to figure out the new rules, and you have to figure out what works under the new rules.
And
The most powerful tool of all is the word no.
And
There’s never enough time.
Wikipedia: Andrew Grove
