Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

The Day Andy Grove Fired Himself

In the middle of the 1980s, Andy Grove was faced with a monumental problem with Intel (INTC). The growth of the company had come about mostly from manufacturing memory chips for computers. At the time, microprocessors were considered more of a side business.

The growing competition from Asia brought the memory chip business under extreme pressure as Asian products were higher quality and cost less. Basically their core business was being taken away from them.

How did Grove respond to the challenge? He made the decision to fire himself. Why?

He understood that Intel had come to a crossroads and the business would would have to go through a seismic shift. So he fired himself so he could come back to the company as the "new" chief executive officer. He was telling himself and everybody else in the company that they would now have to look through fresh eyes on where they were going, and not be held back by the past of Grove or the company.

What he was doing was getting his mind cleared so that he could look at the situation from a new perspective and from there be able to make the right decisions.

If was an effective move as the company started to gradually move away from manufacturing memory chips and started to focus stronger on  microprocessors. They were now targeted on research and product connected to that field.

While it's easy to look back now and think it was a simple thing to do, but many companies don't understand that they may have come to the same inflection point, and go on doing business as usual. If Grove hadn't taken this step, there very well may not have been an Intel today; the issue was that serious.

Grove said in his book that it isn't always easy to recognize these specific points and it may not even be possible to know it's happening until you're in the middle of it.

His solution is that to be successful a business leader and company must always question what they're doing and why, while they keep on looking over their shoulder at what or who is coming up behind them. He added that we must learn to look over a wider space then our own individual businesses in order to identify when this is happening.

This is part of what he means when he says "Only the Paranoid Survive."

Other Andy Grove Resources:

Andy Grove's Rational Exuberance

What I've Learned: Andy Grove

The Digital Age . . . driven by the passion of Intel's Andrew Grove

The History and Influence of Andy Grove

The Education of Andy Grove

Churning Things Up

Grove Quotes

Andy Grove's Re-entrance

Q&A: Andy Grove

Andy Grove enters new post-Intel role as activist capitalist

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