Home > Work > Only the Paranoid Survive. Lessons from the CEO of INTEL Corporation
21 " The ability to recognize that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat in crucial to the future of an enterprise "
― Andrew S. Grove , Only the Paranoid Survive. Lessons from the CEO of INTEL Corporation
22 " Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. "
23 " 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 "
24 " While the story is unique to Intel, the lessons, I believe, are universal "
25 " 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. "
26 " 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 are in competition with millions of similar businesses: millions of other employees all over the world. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves. It is your responsibility to protect this personal business of yours from harm and to position it to benefit from the changes in the environment. Nobody else can do that for you. "
27 " The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up an listen "
28 " Admitting that you need to learn something new is always difficult. It is even harder if you are a senior manager who is accustomed to the automatic deference which people accord you owing to your position. But if you don’t fight it, that very deference may become a wall that isolates you from learning new things. It all takes self-discipline. "
29 " I can’t help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. I guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set an unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really tests the mettle of the leader. By contrast, it doesn’t take much self-confidence to downsize a company—after all, how can you go wrong by shuttering factories and laying people off if the benefits of such actions are going to show up in tomorrow’s bottom line and will be applauded by the financial community? "
30 " The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators. "
31 " The implication was that either the people in the room needed to change their areas of knowledge and expertise or people themselves needed to be changed "
32 " Compaqs, Dells and Novells each of which emerged from practically nothing to become major corporations. What's the common among these companies is that they all instinctively followed the rules for success in a horizontal industry. "
33 " 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. "
34 " if you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself "
35 " Except for one last thing. What if the people who believe in the cheap Internet appliance turn out to be right? "
36 " We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward toward all industries. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living. "
37 " Few of the top ten participants in the new horizontal computer industry rose from the ranks of the old vertical computer industry, bearing testimony to the observation that it is truly difficult for a successful industry participant to adapt to a completely different industry structure. "
38 " Sooner or later,somethingfundamental in yourbusiness worldwill change. "
39 " 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. "
40 " 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 "