Andrew Grove

Andrew "Andy" Stephen Grove (born Gróf András István; 2 September 1936 – 21 March 2016) was a Hungarian-American businessman and engineer who served as the third CEO of Intel Corporation. He left Hungary during the 1956 revolution at the age of 20 and moved to the United States, where he finished his education. He was the third employee and eventual third CEO of Intel, transforming the company into the world's largest semiconductor company.

Personal life and education Grove was born as Gróf András István to a middle-class Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, the son of Mária and György Gróf. At the age of four he contracted scarlet fever, which was nearly fatal and caused partial hearing loss. and forced to do slave labor. The father was reunited with his family only after the war.

During the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, when he was 20, he left his home and family and escaped across the border into Austria. Penniless and barely able to speak English, in 1957 he eventually made his way to the United States. He later changed his name to the anglicized Andrew S. Grove. Grove summarized his first twenty years of life in Hungary in his memoirs:

Shortly after arriving in the United States, Grove worked summer jobs as a busboy at a resort in New Hampshire, where he met Eva Kastan, an Austrian refugee, who was working as a waitress while studying at Hunter College. The two met in 1957 and married in Queens, New York, in June 1958. They remained married until Grove's death and had two daughters, Karen Grove and Robie Livingstone, and eight grandchildren.

Even though he arrived in the United States with little money, Grove retained a "passion for learning." The New York Times stated that "a refugee became a senior in engineering."

Grove attended and graduated with his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

In 1995 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He described his experience in an influential cover article in Fortune in which he criticized the health care system for the lack of communication between different specialists and the unavailability of data compared to the tech industry.

In 2000, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease; he became a contributor to several foundations that sponsor research towards a cure. He died at his home on March 21, 2016, at the age of 79; the cause of death was not publicly disclosed.

Career

Starting Intel

After completing his Ph.D. in 1963, Grove worked at Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher, and by 1967 had become its assistant director of development. His work there made him familiar with the early development of integrated circuits, which would lead to the "microcomputer revolution" in the 1970s. In 1967, he wrote a college textbook on the subject, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.

In 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore co-founded Intel, after they and Grove left Fairchild Semiconductor. Grove joined on the day of its incorporation, although he was not a founder. Fellow Hungarian émigré Leslie L. Vadász was Intel's fourth employee. Grove worked initially as the company's director of engineering, and helped get its early manufacturing operations started. In 1983, he wrote a book, High Output Management, in which he described many of his methods and manufacturing concepts. As a result, he chose to discontinue producing DRAMs and focus instead on manufacturing microprocessors. Grove, along with Intel's sales manager to IBM, Earl Whetstone, played a key role in negotiating with IBM to use only Intel microprocessors in all of their new personal computers.

The company's revenue increased from $2,672 in its first year (1968) to $20.8 billion in 1997. Grove was appointed Intel's president in 1979, CEO in 1987, and then chairman of the board in 1997. In May 1998 Grove relinquished the post of CEO to Craig Barrett, as Grove had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years earlier, though he remained chairman until November 2004. Since then Grove remained at Intel as a senior advisor, and has also been a lecturer at Stanford University. He reflected back upon Intel's growth through the years: In various bits and pieces, we have steered Intel from a start-up to one of the central companies of the information economy. )

Management methods and style

As director of operations, manufacturing became Grove's primary focus and his management style relied heavily on his management concepts. As the company expanded and he was appointed chairman, Grove became more involved in strategic decision-making, including establishing markets for new products, coordinating manufacturing processes and developing new partnerships with smaller companies.

Grove helped create the Intel Architecture Laboratory (IAL) in Oregon to ensure that software was developed in time to take advantage of their new microprocessors. Grove stated that "you are making decisions about what the information technology world will want five years into the future."

Biographer Jeremy Byman observed that Grove "was the one person at Intel who refused to let the company rest on its laurels." Grove explains his reasoning:

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.

Strategic inflection points cause a mismatch between a company's current strategies and changes in the industry, something Grove called strategic dissonance.

Grove believed that the role of Helpful Cassandras, individuals who raise red flags about potential problems and challenge the dominant view, are crucial in identifying and mitigating risks before they become bigger issues. He emphasized the importance of organizations listening to the warnings of Cassandras and taking action, instead of ignoring or suppressing them, in order to identify and successfully address strategic inflection points.

Competitive mindset Grove had a strong competitive mindset, viewing competition as the key driver of innovation and progress. He encouraged companies to aim for industry leadership and constantly seek ways to improve their offerings, processes and operations. He likened himself to a coach and viewed the manager's role as one of fueling employee motivation to excel. He believed "good fear" could play a productive role.

"The quality guru W. Edwards Deming advocated stamping out fear in corporations. I have trouble with the simplemindedness of this dictum. The most important role of managers is to create an environment where 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."

Constructive confrontation Grove fostered a culture of open communication where employees were encouraged to speak their minds in a "constructive confrontation" approach.

Egalitarian ethos Grove asserted that knowledge power surpasses positional power. He ingrained that philosophy in the workplace culture at Intel. "We argue about issues, not the people who advocate them." As a testament to this ethos, there were no executive perks at Intel, including special dining rooms, washrooms, or parking spots. Grove's office was a standard cubicle, reflecting his personal preference for an egalitarian atmosphere. Grove disliked "mahogany-paneled corner offices." "I've been living in cubicles since 1978—and it hasn't hurt a whole lot." An acronym for objectives and key results, it became central to Google's culture as a "management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization." The objective is the clearly defined goal, while the key results were the specific benchmarks to ensure achievement of that goal were "measurable and verifiable."

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, credited OKRs in the foreword to Doerr's book: "OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They've helped make our crazily bold mission of 'organizing the world's information' perhaps even achievable. They've kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most."

Preference for a "job-centric" American economy While Grove supported helping technology startups, he also felt that America was wrong in thinking that those new companies would increase employment. "Startups are a wonderful thing," he wrote in a 2010 article for Bloomberg, "but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment." Although many of those startups and entrepreneurs would achieve tremendous success and wealth, said Grove, he was more concerned with the overall negative effect on America: "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?" He explained the causes and effects of many business's growth plans:

Grove was also in the minority of high-tech leaders when he advocated taxing internet sales made to other states: "I don't think electronic commerce needs federal or state subsidies in terms of tax advantages," he told a Congressional committee in 2000. At the same hearing, he also expressed his opinion about internet privacy, stating that "personal data is a form of property and it's inevitable that governments will regulate property rights." He said that it would be better if the federal government established its own uniform privacy standards rather than have states create a patchwork of different laws.

He also taught graduate computer physics courses at the University of California, Berkeley and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Philanthropy

In 2005, Grove made the largest donation that the City College of New York (CUNY) has ever received. His grant of $26 million transformed the CCNY School of Engineering into the Grove School of Engineering.

Grove was also instrumental, as a key fundraiser, in establishing the University of California, San Francisco's Mission Bay Campus, the largest ongoing biomedical construction project in the world. Chancellor Sam Hawgood said that Grove's "generous and tireless support of UCSF has transformed our university and helped accelerate our research into breakthrough treatments and better patient care." In an interview in Esquire magazine in 2000, Grove encouraged the United States to be "vigilant as a nation to have tolerance for difference, a tolerance for new people." He pointed out that immigration and immigrants are what made America what it is.

Honors and awards Grove received honorary degrees from the City College of New York (1985), Worcester Polytechnic Institute (1989) and Harvard University (2000). Grove was named Time Person of the Year in 1997. In 2004, the Wharton School of Business recognized him as the "Most Influential Business Person of the Last 25 Years." Grove received the award in 1995, and he was honored by the foundation for representing a story "as old as America: the story of a young immigrant rising to great success." The donors of the award added that Grove "has played perhaps the single most pivotal role in the development and popularization of the twentieth century's most remarkable innovationthe personal computer." On August 25, 2009, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that Grove would be one of 13 California Hall of Fame inductees in The California Museum's yearlong exhibit. The induction ceremony was on 1 December 2009 in Sacramento, California. Strategic Management Society's Lifetime Achievement Award (2001) IEEE Medal of Honor (2000) Time magazine's Man of the Year (1997) IndustryWeek Technology Leader of the Year (1997) Chief Executive CEO of the Year (1997) Medal of Achievement from the American Electronics Association (1993) IEEE Engineering Leadership Recognition Award (1987) Franklin Institute Certificate of Merit (1975)

Books

(originally published in 1983)