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With All Due Respect To Microsoft And Intel, There Is No Substitute For Being In The Right Place At The Right Time.

-Andy Grove

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With All Due Respect

Andy Grove

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With All Due Respect To Microsoft And Intel, There Is No Substitute For Being In The Right Place At The Right Time.

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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.

A Career In Journalism Suddenly Lost Its Appeal.

Success Breeds Complacency. Complacency Breeds Failure. Only The Paranoid Survive.

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.

By The Late '90s, Those Who Were Paying Attention Perceived The Internet As A 20-foot Tidal Wave Coming, And We Are All In Kayaks.

Make Mistakes Faster.

Making Mistakes

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.

Let Chaos Reign, Then Rein In Chaos.

A Fundamental Rule In Technology Says That Whatever Can Be Done Will Be Done.

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.

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.

I'm A Great Believer In Particularly Being Alert To Changes That Change Something, Anything, By An Order Of Magnitude, And Nothing Operates With The Factors Of 10 As Profoundly As The Internet.

Bad Companies Are Destroyed By Crisis, Good Companies Survive Them, Great Companies Are Improved By Them.

The Future Is Going To Take Care Of Itself, Like It Always Has.

I Was Glad I Liked Chemistry.

Detect And Fix Any Problem In A Production Process At The Lowest Stage Possible.

You Have To Understand What It Is That You Are Better At Than Anybody Else And Mercilessly Focus Your Efforts On It.

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.

Assume Any Career Move You Make Won't Go Smoothly. They Won't. But Don't Look Back.

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.

Technological Change

E-commerce Is Happening The Way All The Hype Said It Would. Internet Deployment Is Happening. Broadband Is Happening. Everything We Ever Said About The Internet Is Happening. And It Is Very, Very Early. We Can't Even Glimpse It's Potential In Changing The Way People Work And Live.

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.

If The Brutal Facts Are Not Faced By Leaders, The Brutal Reality Sets In.

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.

There Are So Many People Working So Hard And Achieving So Little.

Pickups, S.u.v.'s, Vans And The Like Represent About 80 Million Vehicles, With Mileage Of Perhaps 13 To 16 Miles Per Gallon. Converting Those Should Be Our First Priority.

Whatever Success We Have Had In Maintaining Our Culture Has Been Instrumental In Intel's Success In Surviving Strategic Inflection Points.

Leaders Have To Act More Quickly Today. The Pressure Comes Much Faster.

There Are Two Options: Adapt Or Die.

Congress Will Pass A Law Restricting Public Comment On The Internet To Individuals Who Have Spent A Minimum Of One Hour Actually Accomplishing A Specific Task While On Line.

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.

The Boom Was Healthy Too, Even With Its Excesses. Because What This Incredible Valuation Craze Did Was Draw Untold Sums Of Billions Of Dollars Into Building The Internet Infrastructure. The Hundreds Of Billions Of Dollars That Got Invested In Telecommunications, For Example.

Just As We Could Have Rode Into The Sunset, Along Came The Internet, And It Tripled The Significance Of The Pc.

Think About It. Right Now, A Whole Generation Of Young (customers) In The United States Has Been Brought Up To Take Computers For Granted. Pointing A Mouse Is No More Mysterious To Them Than Hitting The "on" Button On The Television Is To Their Parents.

Most Americans Probably Aren't Aware That There Was A Time In This Country When Tanks And Cavalry Were Massed On Pennsylvania Avenue To Chase Away The Unemployed.

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.

The Most Important Role Of Managers Is To Create Environment In Which People Are Passionately Dedicated To Winning In Marketplace.

Girls Don't Think Boys' Games Are Too Hard, They Think They Are Stupid.

How Well We Communicate Is Determined Not By How Well We Say Things But How Well We Are Understood.

How Can You Motivate Yourself To Continue To Follow A Leader When He Appears To Be Going Around In Circles?

I Have Been Quoted Saying That, In The Future, All Companies Will Be Internet Companies. I Still Believe That. More Than Ever, Really

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.

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.

Every Generation Thinks That They Invented Sex.

Privacy Is One Of The Biggest Problems In This New Electronic Age.

Investment Decisions And Personal Decisions Don't Wait For The Picture To Be Clarified.

The Worse The News, The More Effort Should Go Into Communicating It.

If The World Operates As One Big Market, Every Employee Will Compete With Every Person Anywhere In The World Who Is Capable Of Doing The Same Job. There Are Lots Of Them And Many Of Them Are Hungry

Not All Problems Have A Technological Answer, But When They Do, That Is The More Lasting Solution.

You Have No Choice But To Operate In A World Shaped By Globalization And The Information Revolution. There Are Two Options: Adapt Or Die.

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.

No Problem Is So Complicated That You Cannot Make It More Complicated.

Only The Paranoid Survive.

So Give Me A Turbulent World As Opposed To A Quiet World And I'll Take The Turbulent One.

Pcmcia - People Can't Memorize Computer Industries Acronyms

The Lesson Is, We All Need To Expose Ourselves To The Winds Of Change

The Internet Doesn't Change Everything. It Doesn't Change Supply And Demand. It Doesn't Magically Allow You To Build Businesses By Turning Investors' Money Into Operating Expenses Indefinitely. The Money Always Runs Out Eventually.. The Internet Doesn't Change That, As We Have Seen.

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.

Technology Will Always Win. You Can Delay Technology By Legal Interference, But Technology Will Flow Around Legal Barriers.

The Internet Doesn't Change Everything. It Doesn't Change Supply And Demand.

Supply And Demand

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?

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.

With All Due Respect To Microsoft And Intel, There Is No Substitute For Being In The Right Place At The Right Time.

Growth Is Kinda Built Into Everyone's Genes. It's Built Into Management's Genes, The Salesman's Genes, The Investors' Desires. People Expect Companies To Grow.

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.

Competition Is Warfare. Mostly It Is Played By Prescribed Rules--there Is A Sort Of Geneva Convention For Competition--but It's Thorough And Often Brutal.

I Wasn't Cut Out To Be An Opera Singer, But It Was A Nice Fantasy For A Teenager Growing Up In Hungary During The Stalinist Era.

Activity Is Not Output.

I Don't See Merced Appearing On A Mainstream Desktop Inside Of A Decade.

Technology Happens, It's Not Good, It's Not Bad. Is Steel Good Or Bad?

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