Quotes from Andrew S. Grove

Insufficiently trained employees, in spite of their best intentions, produce inefficiencies, excess costs, unhappy customers, and sometimes even dangerous situations. The importance of training rapidly becomes obvious to the manager who runs into these problems.

In other words, one of the manager's key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance: •  What decision needs to be made? •  When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? •  Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? •  Who will ratify or veto the decision? •  Who will need to be informed of the decision?

a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.

The two basic managerial roles produce two basic kinds of meetings. In the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged. Such meetings take place on a regularly scheduled basis. The purpose of the second kind of meeting is to solve a specific problem. Meetings of this sort, called mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision. They are ad hoc affairs, not scheduled long in advance, because they usually can't be.

Are you adding real value or merely passing information along? How do you add more value? By continually looking for ways to make things truly better in your department. You are a manager. The central thought of my book is that the output of a manager is the output of his organization. In principle, every hour of your day should be spent increasing the output or the value of the output of the people whom you're responsible for.

The subordinate did poor work. My associate's reaction: 'He has to make his own mistakes. That's how he learns!' The problem with this is that the subordinate's tuition is paid by his customers. And that is absolutely wrong.

Globalization simply means that business knows no national boundaries. Capital and work—your work and your counterparts' work—can go anywhere on earth and do a job.

For Maslow, motivation is closely tied to the idea of needs, which cause people to have drives, which in turn result in motivation. A need once satisfied stops being a need and therefore stops being a source of motivation. Simply put, if we are to create and maintain a high degree of motivation, we must keep some needs unsatisfied at all times.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done. Consequently, once the PC brought a "10X" lower cost for a given performance, it was only a matter of time before its impact would spread through the entire computing world and transform it. This change

what self-actualization means: the need to achieve one's utter personal best in a chosen field of endeavor. Once someone's source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.

During the 1920s the market for automobiles changed slowly and subtly. Henry Ford's slogan for the Model T—"It takes you there and brings you back"—epitomized the original attraction of the car as a mode of basic transportation. In 1921, more than half of all cars sold in the United States were Fords. But

A simple test can be used to determine where someone is in the motivational hierarchy. If the absolute sum of a raise in salary an individual receives is important to him, he is working mostly within the physiological or safety modes. If, however, what matters to him is how his raise stacks up against what other people got, he is motivated by esteem/recognition or self-actualization, because in this case money is clearly a measure.

I think, by applying our production principles. First, we must identify our limiting step: what is the "egg" in our work?

if a presenter makes a factual error, it is your responsibility to go on record. Remember, you are being paid to attend the meeting, which is not meant to be a siesta in the midst of an otherwise busy day. Regard attendance at the meeting for what it is: work.

our role as managers is, first, to train the individuals (to move them along the horizontal axis shown in the illustration on this page), and, second, to bring them to the point where self-actualization motivates them, because once there, their motivation will be self-sustaining and limitless.

one person usually has more at stake in the outcome of the meeting than others. In fact, it is usually the chairman or the de facto chairman who calls the meeting, and most of what he contributes should occur before it begins. All too often he shows up as if he were just another attendee and hopes that things will develop as he wants. When a mission-oriented meeting fails to accomplish the purpose for which it was called, the blame belongs to the chairman

Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff.

we must first overcome cultural prejudice. Our society respects someone's throwing himself into sports, but anybody who works very long hours is regarded as sick, a workaholic. So the prejudices of the majority say that sports are good and fun, but work is drudgery, a necessary evil, and in no way a source of pleasure.

But data are about the past, and strategic inflection points are about the future.

Of course, you can't spend all of your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter you with noise. Over time, then, you can adjust your receptivity accordingly.

Turning the workplace into a playing field can turn our subordinates into "athletes" dedicated to performing at the limit of their capabilities—the key to making our team consistent winners.

The role of the manager here is also clear: it is that of the coach. First, an ideal coach takes no personal credit for the success of his team, and because of that his players trust him. Second, he is tough on his team. By being critical, he tries to get the best performance his team members can provide. Third, a good coach was likely a good player himself at one time. And having played the game well, he also understands it well.

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

The first stage should be free discussion, in which all points of view and all aspects of an issue are openly welcomed and debated. The greater the disagreement and controversy, the more important becomes the word free.