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

"I think the changes in the part of the economy that I have the right to comment on, the things that I've witnessed in my lifetime, have all been incremental changes."

Grove's comment above was in response to a question about if the current technological changes were the types of changes like when movable type was invented (printing press).

While the neverending hype tries to make it look like it's never happened before, in reality, like Grove said at the time: it's really incremental changes. The changes may be faster, but they're still incremental.

Watch Google today, and if you view them from an objective standpoint, everything they're doing now is incremental as well. Sometimes what can fool someone is the current speed of changes which make it look like things are happening extemporaneously.

Not only that, but it's also very linear, as the company is attempting to keep to its core purpose and built out things connected to that.

Why is this important to know? If a business owner or manager is made to believe that they're in the midst of one of those rare true disruption of the world, they will do business in a much different manner than they did before.

For example, the story of the newspaper industry today. Technology has changed much of the choice of how to consume the content we want, but it hasn't changed the desire to access content. We are simply consuming it in a different way now. That's an incremental change.

The reason the industry is in such bad shape, is they made the same mistakes that the music industry did by not responding sooner to the changing consumer environment.

This isn't some big disruption as far as the desire for people to read content goes, it's only a disruption as far as how they do it.

Disney understood this quickly, and made decisions and took action to go online and embrace it before any of the major companies.

All this means is that there are very few true disruption in the world that happen even within a lifetime, let alone the hyped up ones that are foisted on us as happening about every other day.

Technology changes aren't going to change the core purpose for business ever. What it will do is change the way people will interact with us.

We need to be careful not to move off of our core purpose and vision to chase after every whispering in the wind that could end up taking our businesses down. At the same time we need to understand the times we're in and not stubbornly hold out, trying to milk every penny out of the way we have been doing things to the detriment of future growth.

This is why Grove was so effective as Intel's (INTC) CEO. He understood the delicate balancing act between the two and was able to navigate the company successfully through the treacherous waters.