Quotes from Andrew S. Grove

A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.

In general, meddling stems from a supervisor exploiting too much superior work knowledge (real or imagined). The negative leverage produced comes from the fact that after being exposed to many such instances, the subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his supervisor.

There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.

if your organization uses e-mail, a lot more people know what's going on in your business than did before, and they know it a lot faster than they used to.

Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or "flattened" the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.

Adapt or die. Some

So in the end careful interviewing doesn't guarantee you anything, it merely increases your odds of getting lucky.

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.

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.

When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it.

if we want to cultivate achievement-driven motivation, we need to create an environment that values and emphasizes output.

You cannot stay in the self-actualized mode if you're always worried about failure.

Sooner or later, something fundamental in your business world will change.

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.

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

In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry.

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.

Don't differentiate without a difference.

Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.