I recently concluded Only the Paranoid
Survive – How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and
Career (Andrew S. Grove, 224 pages), and it was great.
Andrew Grove is a legend. His is probably
most known for his leadership during the time Intel moved
away from being a memory
chip company, due to harsh Japanese competition on that market, in the mid-1980’s,
to become the world’s leader in processing chip. Looking back, this may sound
natural. But achieving it was all but so. The whole identity and soul of Intel,
which Andrew helped founding, was based on memory chips. Moving away from it
took an arduous period of 3 years, and really strong fighting by Andrew and, on
the beginning, only a handful other managers that accepted the idea.
This is one of the stories the book discusses,
with lots of insights on these strategic inflection points (which can actually last
years!) which a company, or even an individual, has to go through sometimes.
Several inflection points in retrospective become difficult to put the finger
on exactly when it actually happened, as Andrew very well describes, because there
is a process of changes going on before and after, and it can all turn out into
a messy process. But totally necessary, if a company or person in crisis wants
to survive and thrive.
Andrew has himself a fantastic personal story,
having lived under Nazi and Soviet occupation in Budapest before emigrating to the
US at the age of 20, where he managed to conclude a PhD in Berkeley, and later
became the third CEO of Intel (1987-97). Yet, I found inspiring his clarity of
thinking about his own limitations during his time as a leader of Intel, and
how he for example gives credits to plant manufacturing managers for starting
taking practical decisions in allocating more processing chip production even
at the time when he himself had difficulties in admitting the company needed a
drastic change. His humility and openness are remarkable.
And the book also takes on the importance
of constant learning and being “paranoid” about changes that may impact one’s business.
With the caveat that Andrew points out that even employees should see themselves
as a business, selling some service in a competitive and ever-changing environment.
So, because of all of that and lots more that
I fail to describe, I think this is a great book, that is worth the time for someone
looking for solid substance in a technology world that is fluently unpredictable.
