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81 " 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 , Only the Paranoid Survive. Lessons from the CEO of INTEL Corporation
82 " 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 "
83 " 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 , High Output Management
84 " In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry. "
85 " On the other hand, when there’s a fundamental change in the industry and you don’t change your skills, you will lose at both winning companies and losing companies. That is a situation that can truly be classified as a career inflection point. "
86 " Electronic banking is still a clumsy way to replace a stamp. And interactive television seems to have vanished even before the ink dried on the mega-announcements. "
87 " When people in the company start asking questions like @But how can we say "X" when we do "Y"? more than anything else this is a tip-off that a strategic inflection point may very well be in the making "
88 " "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
89 " When the environment changes more rapidly than one can change rules, or when a set of circumstances is so ambiguous and unclear that a contract between the parties that attempted to cover all possibilities would be prohibitively complicated, we need another mode of control, which is based on cultural values. "
90 " The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back. "
91 " A poor performer has a strong tendency to ignore his problem. "
92 " Do any exceptions exist to the universality of hybrid organizations? The only exceptions that come to my mind are conglomerates, which are typically organized in a totally mission-oriented form. Why are they an exception to our rule? Because they do not have a common business purpose. "
93 " Does that mean that you shouldn’t plan? Not at all. 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. "
94 " the most important consideration should be this: the shift back and forth between the two types of organizations can and should be initiated to match the operational styles and aptitudes of the managers running the individual units. "
95 " our capital authorization process itself is important, not the authorization itself. To prepare and justify a capital spending request, people go through a lot of soul-searching analysis and juggling, and it is this mental exercise that is valuable. The formal authorization is useful only because it enforces the discipline of the process. "
96 " Your general planning process should consist of analogous thinking. Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organization? Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed? Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now doing? Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2. Namely, what more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand? "
97 " If the decision-making process has proceeded correctly up to this point, the senior manager will be making the decision having had the full benefit of free discussion wherein all points of view, facts, opinions, and judgments were aired without position-power prejudice. In other words, it is legitimate—in fact, sometimes unavoidable—for the senior person to wield position-power authority if the clear decision stage is reached and no consensus has developed. It is not legitimate—in fact, it is destructive—for him to wield that authority any earlier. This is often not easy. We Americans tend to be reluctant to exercise position power deliberately and explicitly—it is just “not nice” to give orders. Such reluctance on the part of the senior manager can prolong the first phase of the decision-making process—the time of free discussion—past the optimum point, and the decision will be put off. "
98 " one of the manager’s key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance: • What decision needs to be made? • When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? • Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? • Who will ratify or veto the decision? • Who will need to be informed of the decision? "
99 " Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned. "
100 " To put a man on the moon, NASA asked several major contractors and many subcontractors to work together, each on a different aspect of the project. An unintended consequence of the moon shot was the development of a new organizational approach: matrix management. "