Grove, Andy 1936–

views updated May 08 2018

Andy Grove
1936

Chairman, Intel Corporation

Nationality: American.

Born: September 2, 1936, in Budapest, Hungary.

Education: City College of New York, BS, 1960; University of California, Berkeley, PhD, 1963.

Family: Son of George (dairyman) and Maria (bookkeeper); married Eva Kastan (homemaker), 1958; children: two.

Career: Fairchild Semiconductor Research Laboratory, 19631966, research engineer, transistors; 19661967, section leader, surface and device physics; 19671968, assistant director, research and development; Intel Corporation, 19681979, vice president and director of operations; 19791987, president; 19871998, chief executive officer; 1998, chairman of the board.

Awards: Honored by American Institute of Chemists, 1960; Achievement Award, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 1969; J. J. Ebers Award, IEEE, 1974; Merit certificate, Franklin Institute, 1975; Townsend Harris Medal, City College of New York (CCNY), 1980; Engineering Leadership Recognition Award, IEEE, 1987; Enterprise Award, Professional Advertising Association, 1987; George Washington Award, American Hungarian Fund, 1990; Achievement medal, American Electronics Association, 1993; Citizen of the Year, World Forum of Silicon Valley, 1993; Executive of the Year, University of Arizona, 1993; Person of the Year, PC magazine, 1993; Heinz Foundation Award for Technology and the Economy, 1995; John von Neumann medal, American Hungarian Association, 1995; Steinman medal, CCNY, 1995; Statesman of the Year, Harvard Business School, 1996; CEO of the Year, CEO magazine, 1997; International Achievement Award, World Trade Club, 1997; Cinema Digital Technologies Award, Cannes Film Festival, 1997; Computer Entrepreneur Award, IEEE, 1997; Man of the Year, Time, 1997; Technology Leader of the Year, Industry Week, 1997; Distinguished Executive of the Year, Academy of Management, 1998; Medal of Honor, IEEE, 2000; Lifetime Achievement Award, Strategic Management Society, 2001.

Publications: Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, 1967; High Output Management, 1983; One-on-One

with Andy Grove, 1988; Only the Paranoid Survive, 1996; Swimming Across, 2001.

Address: Intel Corporation, 2200 Mission College Boulevard, Santa Clara, California 95052-8119; http://www.intel.com.

Andrew Steven Grove, universally known as Andy Grove, began making his mark while he was at Fairchild Semiconductor Research Laboratory, by helping solve the problem of inconsistency in the responses of silicon chips to electricity. When he went to work at Intel Corporation, he was expected to direct the young company's engineers, but he quickly became the de facto chief operating officer. Grove organized the factories, called "fabs" (for fabrication plants), that made semiconductor chips, and it was Grove who set the corporate tone for Intel for three decades. He had a hand in every major development at Intel, which meant that he was part of almost every major event in the history of the manufacture and sale of computers from 1970 well into the 21st century. Partly because of his foresight, leadership, and relentless hard work, computers found their way into the lives of almost every human being on earth, affecting the lives of billions in large and small ways and making Grove one of the most influential businesspeople in history.

"ONLY THE PARANOID SURVIVE"

The title of Grove's 1996 book Only the Paranoid Survive sums up much of Grove's management philosophy. He came by his paranoia naturally: it was essential to his survival. He was born András Gróf into a not religious Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, which was ruled by a military dictator whose government persecuted Jews. That Gróf was not a Jewish surname may have helped his family avoid some of the worst of the persecution. As a small child, Grove had scarlet fever, which not only nearly killed him but also rendered him partly deaf. With the advent of World War II and Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and joined the Germans. In 1944, when the war went badly for Germany, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government, fearing that the Hungarians were about to make peace with the Soviets. The rounding up of Jews for death camps and slave labor soon began. Grove's father was forced to serve in the German army at the Eastern Front, where he endured appalling tortures for the amusement of German soldiers. Grove and his mother hid under false names with a Christian family; almost every day was a close call, as soldiers snatched Jews off the streets and out of their homes. Then the Soviets fought their way into Budapest, bringing with them more persecution (and the rape of Grove's mother).

Grove wanted to be a journalist, but he discovered that journalistic success depended on the whims of political correctness, and he decided to enter a field where subjectivity would not affect judgments about his work; he chose to study chemistry. In 1956 Hungarians tried to replace their Communist government with a democracy, and the Soviet Union in vaded their nation. There was fighting in Budapest's streets as young people tried to repel soldiers and tanks with small weapons and bottles filled with gasoline. Soviet troops began snatching young men and imprisoning, torturing, or killing them. Grove and his best friend, Janos Lanyi, fled to Austria, dodging Soviet troops, crawling in mud, afraid all the way. He had lived 20 years under murderous oppression, surviving by always remaining alert to the possibility that even a simple attempt to purchase a loaf of bread could cause him to disappear along with many other young Hungarians.

A DETERMINATION TO SUCCEED

The International Rescue Committee helped Grove immigrate from Austria to the United States, where he lived in the Bronx with an aunt and uncle who had immigrated in the 1930s. He quickly Americanized his name to Andrew Grove. A worker for the International Rescue Committee gave him a blank check to purchase a good hearing aid. Years later, in 2001, Grove would donate the proceeds from the memoir of his childhood, Swimming Across, to the International Rescue Committee.

Grove attended City College of New York from 1957 to 1960, spending his evenings poring over his class notes with a dictionary to understand difficult English words. When he was not in class or studying, he worked as a busboy. While at work he met Eva Kastan, who was then a waitress (and also a Hungarian refugee). After Grove graduated from City College, the couple moved to California, where Grove attended Stanford University, focusing on fluid mechanics and earning his PhD in only three years. Grove's hard work and his keen, creative mind earned him a reputation for brilliance and gave him his pick of jobs with elite American technology companies. He chose to go to work for Fairchild Semiconductor Research Laboratory, a subsidiary of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, in California.

Two of Grove's bosses at Fairchild were Robert Noyce coinventor of the integrated circuit, and George Moore, the coiner of Moore's Law, stated that computer chips would double in power and be halved in price every eighteen months. In 1968 Noyce and Moore established Intel, raising $2.3 million in start-up capital from the venture capitalist Arthur Rockwho would earn over $500 million for his investment. The first scientist Noyce and Moore hired was Grove.

MORE OF A MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY THAN A STYLE

When Grove joined Intel in 1968, he was put to work managing the engineers who researched and developed semiconductors for Intel. Grove brought with him the personal traits that had helped him survive dictators and mass murderers and had enabled him to earn a BS in three years and a doctorate in three more. He was interested in every detail of the operations of Intel, regardless of whether it was directly related to his management of engineers. He spent long hours studying the math and experimental science behind Intel's products.

Almost immediately evident was his passion for orderliness. He expected every part of Intel's laboratories and "fabs" to be clean, earning the nickname "Mr. Clean." He wanted statistics on everything his employees did, forcing them to work until midnight to record every detail Grove wantedthere were no personal computers to help them, so they had to do every calculation by hand and slide rule. Grove used the statistics to monitor trends in productivity. This practice proved invaluable when Intel faced competition in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, because it allowed Intel to maintain a high standard of quality in most of its operations; it also revealed where Intel was likely to lose money rather than make money.

Not everything Grove did was productive. For instance, in 1971, he ordered all Intel employees to sign in with the time of their arrival at work. He stationed security guards at entrances to Intel's buildings to enforce the policy. Grove did this out of frustration with employees' showing up at odd hours. What happened, however, was that employees who arrived bright and early for meetings in one building would be recorded as late when they later went to their offices in another building. Then, too, employees who had been working 14-hour days and 100-hour weeks switched to eight-hour days and 40-hour weeks and stopped working weekends. Despite the decrease in productivity caused by the policy, Grove did not withdraw it until June 1988, and in 1994 he reinstated the "late list."

TEMPER AND SHOUTS

Another problem some employees faced was Grove's explosive temper; he harangued and yelled at them, often in front of other employees, a tactic he called "constructive confrontation." He had a quick mind and could think faster than most people, and he sometimes rejected employees' proposals by shouting them down with reasons the proposals would not work. Sometimes he was mistaken, and if the proposals were good ones, he might apologize and even admit that he was wrongbut Intel lost employees who felt humiliated by Grove. Some of the shouting may have been a result of Grove's deafness; he had trouble hearing until a series of operations repaired his eardrums in the 1970s and 1980s.

There was method to Grove's style, even though his approach to management superficially seemed to be leadership by intimidation. In fact, Grove studied management as intensely as he studied science. In the 1970s he faced a volatile market for computer chips; Intel was just one of many firms trying to build markets for their technology. To make Intel one of the successes required building a demand for its particular products and staying ahead of other manufacturers in the development of ever more powerful chips. Grove approached these demands with a ruthlessness that characterized his entire management career. For instance, he instituted an unending series of productivity reviews for every Intel employee. He studied every aspect of production and found ways to quantify it: how many dollars were earned for Intel by an employee's performance or how many problems were solved by a given employee. Part of his strategy for management by paranoia was to make it clear to all employees that the bottom 10 percent in his ratings could expect to be fired every year.

This evaluation process provided data that Grove could use to build models of success and failure for Intel as a whole. The data also gave him clues to which aspects of Intel's operations needed to be improved and which operations should be emulated by the rest of the company. He created a corporate culture in which employees strove to stay out of the bottom 10 percent, because they believed that there would always be someone behind them ready to take their jobs if they failed to perform well. Meanwhile, Grove compensated for the 10 percent turnover rate (which soared to 25 percent in the fabs, as employees quit because of the stress of the evaluations and productivity demands) with vigorous recruitment of new college graduates. He, Noyce, and Moore were brilliant recruiters, and Intel's position at the cutting edge of technology was a powerful lure for new graduates. Further, Grove made sure that management employees stayed in touch with their old professors to learn of the brightest students in their colleges.

Grove also refined the evaluation process with what was called Intel's Management by Objectives (IMBO). In this process, the company drew up a statement of what each individual employee was expected to achieve in a quarter; the objectives achieved were recorded so that an employee could see the percentage of objectives, "IMBOs," he or she was achieving. The IMBOs could be unreasonably high, reflecting Grove's view than nothing is too good to be improved, but part of the beauty of the system was that the number of IMBOs required could be adjusted when statistics showed the target to be too high.

MORE THAN JUST MEETINGS

Another important aspect of Grove's management philosophy was the meeting. To Grove, meetings were essential to Intel's productivity, and during the 1970s he honed his techniques for running meetings. Every meeting had a specific starting time and duration, and people who arrived late were sometimes shut out. The meeting's leader, usually Grove himself, would make sure that discussion focused on a clear, written statement of what the meeting was meant to accomplish. The meeting could be about a low yield of viable chips in a fab, about marketing a new product, or about getting departments to cooperate with one another more efficiently. At the end of each meeting the results were quantified and measured against the meeting's objectives.

Grove's ideas on efficient and productive meetings were explained in his first book on management philosophy, High Output Management, and through that book they became part of the corporate culture of uncounted American businesses. Yet Grove had more to offer than theoretical and applied management techniques. In spite of his notorious temper, he was usually an affable man known for his bright smile and personal warmth. He applied these traits to a newspaper column he began in 1984 for the San Jose Mercury ; it was a "Dear Abby"-style advice column in which he explained how people could survive the day-to-day grind of work, and it touched on subjects from personal efficiency to how to get along with coworkers. These columns became the basis for another book, One-on-One with Andy Grove, a guide to surviving the corporate jungle.

SAVING INTEL FROM DEATH

In the early 1980s Intel's fortunes dropped. The main source of Intel's income was the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chip that Intel had pioneered and turned into an essential component of computers. The Japanese corporations Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Toshiba invested heavily in research into DRAMs, and by 1979 Fujitsu had a 64K (64,000 bits of memory) DRAM chip ready for the mass market, beating Intel to the 64K level by two years. The Japanese also invested in industrial espionage, trying to steal the secrets of American chip manufacturers, and Fujitsu copied Intel's 8086 microprocessor, the heart of the emerging personal computers for the mass market. Grove did not back down from fights, and he sought ever better ways to improve Intel's products and to cut production costs. But he refused to believe that the Japanese companies were more efficient manufacturers than Intel, and that refusal set Intel back, because the Japanese fabs were, in fact, superior to most American plants in getting the most out of their resources. Whereas Intel would have a success rate of 50 percent to 80 percentin terms of functional chips at the end of the manufacturing processJapanese corporations were achieving 80 percent to 98 percent success rates.

By 1985 Intel was in desperate straits, losing money because the Japanese corporations were dumping their chips on the American marketselling below cost in order to drive competitors out of business. For instance, a Hitachi directive ordered its salespeople to undersell everyone in America by at least 10 percent, no matter how low the price went. Eventually this placed Grove, then Intel's president, and Moore, Intel's chief executive officer, in the painful situation of having to make cuts in Intel's manufacturing process. Grove directed the end of Intel's manufacturing of DRAM chips, laid off more than three thousand employees, and focused the company on making microprocessors. To this task Grove brought all of his considerable intelligence and experience, using the courts to stop the copying of Intel's microprocessors and developing efficient processes for creating more powerful microprocessors, following Moore's Law of doubling power and halving cost every eighteen months. The result was the 80386SX chip that in 1989 became the fundamental processor in most of the world's computers.

When he became CEO in 1987, Grove brought the manufacturing expert Craig Barrett up from Intel's ranks to become president. As a team, Grove and Barrett streamlined Intel's manufacturing process, and they made every Intel fab a duplicate of every other Intel fab, allowing improvements to be applied universally to the manufacture of chips. This suited the business climate that was evolving partly as a result of the improving inventory control that Intel's microprocessors allowed. Corporations were cutting overhead by reducing or eliminating their inventories and taking delivery of the products they needed only days before they were to be used. Intel could tell customers exactly when new, more powerful chips would be available, and thus it was able to adapt to customers' schedules even a year and a half in advance. In 1992 Intel profits topped $1 billion, and it was the dominant manufacturer of microprocessors.

In 1994 Intel hit a bump in its road of success. A college professor discovered that Intel's new "pentium" chip had a flaw in making long division, and he published exactly what the flaw was. Grove knew that the flaw would affect a computer's calculations only once in tens of thousands of years of constant use, so he had Intel promise to replace only those chips used in computers making exceptionally complex calculations, mostly in scientific research. But that made it appear that Intel was not committed to making its microprocessors of the highest quality. Eventually, at the cost of $475 million, Intel promised to replace all the flawed chips with new ones in which the flaw had been eliminated. It turned into a public relations victory for Intel, restoring confidence in its products.

During the 1990s Intel's gross revenues averaged increases of 25 percent per year, with profits soaring by 40 percent per year. When Grove retired as CEO to become chairman of the board, his share of Intel was worth several hundred million dollars, but he lived modestly, eschewing many of the trappings of great wealth and power. He even had to jockey for a parking space in Intel's Santa Clara lot, just like every other employee. He had become one of the world's most admired businessmen, and his business course at Stanford was always crammed with students. At Intel he focused on helping shape Intel's future, working with the new CEO, Barrett, to diversify Intel's holdings and product line to meet a changing global economy. By 2004 Intel's microprocessors ran 80 percent to 90 percent of the world's computers, and the "itanium" chip, a special project for Grove, was expected to be a big winner as the processor of choice for large computers. The new chip ran at 4.5 gigahertz (4.5 billion calculations per second) and put Intel's technology far ahead of its competitors at that time.

See also entry on Intel Corporation in International Directory of Company Histories.

sources for further information

Buderi, Robert, Engines of Tomorrow: How the World's Best Companies Are Using Their Research Labs to Win the Future, New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Jackson, Tim, Inside INTEL: Andy Grove and the Rise of the World's Most Powerful Chip Company, New York: Dutton, 1997.

Ramo, Joshua Cooper, "Man of the Year: Andrew S. Grovea Survivor's Tale," Time, December 29, 1997, pp. 5467.

Kirk H. Beetz

Andrew S. Grove

views updated May 23 2018

Andrew S. Grove

For 30 years, American businessman Andrew S. Grove (born 1936) has served in a variety of high-level posts at Intel Corp., considered one of the most powerful microprocessor manufacturers in the world.

From humble beginnings in Hungary, Grove went on to become chief executive officer (CEO) and chairperson of one the most powerful microprocessor manufacturing companies in the world, Intel Corp. He is highly regarded both as a physicist in the field of semiconductors as well as an expert in management. With Intel, he has helped to usher in an information revolution unmatched by anything since the invention of the printing press. As noted by Walter Isaacson in Time: "Time chooses as its 1997 Man of the Year Andrew Steven Grove, chairman and CEO of Intel, the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips."

Early Life

Andrew Steven Grove was born András Gróf in Budapest, Hungary, on September 2, 1936. His father, George, was a dairyman, and his mother, Maria, worked as a bookkeeping clerk. The family was of Jewish descent and World War II proved to be a difficult time; Grove would see nothing but trouble until he departed from Europe. At the age of four, a wave of scarlet fever swept through Hungary. Grove was not spared, and over the course of the illness, his hearing was seriously damaged. The following year, his father was removed to a Nazi work camp. Grove and his mother changed their names and moved in with Christian acquaintances, who hid them during the Nazi pogroms of 1944. After the war, his father miraculously reappeared, though weakened by typhus and pneumonia. Grove, hoping to attend college in a few years, dabbled in journalism and took voice lessons, dreaming of perhaps becoming an opera singer. Political circumstances again intervened, however, in 1956, when Soviet tanks arrived in Budapest to put down the Hungarian Revolution. His father's occupation, as a private business owner, made Grove a potential dissident in the eyes of the communists. So, rather than face the possibility of prison, Grove and a friend fled to Austria.

From there, Grove made his way to the United States, where he moved in with an uncle who had immigrated to New York in the early 1930s. He enrolled in the City College of New York (CCNY), studying chemical engineering and waiting tables to pay his tuition. In the summer of 1957, he met a woman named Eva, who became his wife the following year. Grove graduated from CCNY in 1960, after which he and Eva relocated to California, where he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley. There, as at CCNY, he performed spectacularly. Upon his graduation in 1963, he went to work for Fairchild Semiconductor, a small company which had recently been created by a few of the more forward-thinking engineers on the West Coast. He also began teaching at Berkeley, a side career he has continued to the present day.

At Fairchild, along with the head of the research department, Gordon Moore, and two other colleagues, Bruce Deal and Edward Snow, Grove helped create the first marketable silicon-based integrated circuit. This was a major step for the computer industry, which, until then, used transistors as switching elements in their products. To be sure, transistors were far better than their predecessors, vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes were bulky, and they generated a tremendous amount of heat and consumed an equally large amount of electricity. The transistor was considerably smaller, and required no heating element. The drawback was that they had to be used individually. In order to move forward, the industry required that more than one transistor occupy a single unit. The solution to this dilemma came as early as 1959, but it would take several years, and the particular combination of talents that existed at Fairchild, under the leadership of general manager Bob Noyce, to create a reliable, mass-produced integrated circuit. That accomplishment stood poised to revolutionize the industry, and thereafter, the world.

Grove Moves to Intel

None of this made much of an impact on the top executives of Fairchild-they displayed the same lack of vision that kills so many high-technology companies even today. So, in 1968, frustrated with the state of affairs, Noyce secured the support of Arthur Rock, a prominent high-tech investor, and with Gordon Moore's help, started a company called Intel (short for Integrated Electronics). With these three men, the company looked unsinkable. Their decision to employ Grove as director of operations was, however, in the words of Tim Jackson's history of Intel, "so bizarre that it mystified most of the people who were watching the new business take shape." Up to that point, Grove had virtually no manufacturing experience at all, plus he was decidedly unusual. Jackson continued, "Grove spoke English with an accent that was almost incomprehensible. Over his head, he wore an awkward hearing-aid device that looked like a product of Eastern European engineering." Furthermore, he had a severe temper, and an equally severe manner of maintaining discipline and control. None-the-less, Noyce and Moore admired his intelligence and drive, and they believed he was the right man. Grove tacitly agreed, leaving Fairchild almost immediately.

The doubts held by onlookers concerning his abilities were quickly put to rest. Grove guided the development of manufacturing processes first for the company's computer memory products, then for its first general-purpose microprocessor (the component that serves as the "brain" of modern desktop computers), outstripping all competitors and even the company which had licensed their technology to provide the "second-source" so important to computer companies at that time. The early years of the company were particularly hectic, as the demands of the high-tech sector tended to change dramatically and unpredictably. Thus, despite the concentrated talent at their disposal, Intel found itself constantly changing gears, and struggling to keep up with the latest developments. Grove's force of will aided the company greatly during this period, but an insight of Moore's was necessary for long-term stability. Moore's Law, as the insight came to be known, was that chip power would continue to double roughly every 18 months for the foreseeable future. Thus, Intel was able to chart its course ahead of the fact rather than leaping after changes in demand.

Moore's Law did not, however, eliminate all difficulties. The first major crisis began in the mid-1970s, when Japanese companies, who could manufacture memory chips at much lower costs, began dumping large quantities of cut-rate chips on American markets, seriously reducing demand for Intel's products. This was a major blow for the company, whose business relied at that time primarily on the sale of memory. They responded by shifting their emphasis to microprocessors, but many rival American companies collapsed under the pressure. In 1981, the chip market took another nosedive, and once again, many companies were caught unprepared. Grove, rather than laying off employees, ordered them to work 25 percent overtime for free. The strategy succeeded, and Intel survived.

Grove's hard work and demanding management style, while criticized by many, brought ever-increasing profits for Intel, and in 1979, he was made president of the company. Four years later, he published his second book, High Output Management, which was subsequently translated into 11 languages (his first volume, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, was published in 1967 during his tenure at Fairchild). His third book, One-on-One with Andy Grove, was published in 1987. He also wrote a regular management column which appeared in several newspapers, as well as occasional pieces for the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and the New York Times. He became the CEO of Intel in 1987. The decade of the 1980s brought him recognition outside of the company as well. He received honorary doctorates from the City College of New York and from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1985 and 1989, respectively. Furthermore, he was honored in 1987 with the Engineering Leadership Recognition Award.

The Half-Billion Dollar Mistake

Intel's biggest stumbling block came abruptly in 1994, with the release of the company's Pentium processor. The chip was flawed slightly, performing math calculations incorrectly. The error was small, and would not have affected the vast majority of users-only people running math-intensive programs like those required for nuclear research or astrophysics. Grove decided that there would therefore be no reason to order a recall. Those who called in to ask about the problem were simply told not to worry. Intel's customers didn't see the matter the same way, and in short order, the flaw was suddenly the topic of technology columns in newspapers around the world. After much deliberation, Grove backed off his position, and Intel began replacing the faulty chips. The crisis cost the company half a billion dollars, but in the end the decision to switch courses wound up bolstering their image. Intel was stronger than ever.

As noted by Isaacson in Time, Intel controls 90% of the microprocessor market. They also face little in the way of competition, although the combined efforts of IBM, Apple, and Motorola are beginning to have some effect. Grove, certainly not one to rest on his laurels, has made the 1990s a productive decade for himself as well. His fourth book, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company and Career, was published in 1996, and several more awards have been forthcoming as well. In 1993, he received a Medal of Achievement from the American Engineering Association, and, in March of 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. The following year, he was awarded the Heinz Family Foundation Award for Technology and the Economy. Finally, Time magazine named him their Man of the Year in 1997.

The challenges in Intel's future are many. The increasing popularity of sub-$1000 computers could prove damaging to the company's flagship product, the high-end Pentium II. Also, Intel has had to cope with increasing scrutiny from the U.S. Federal government, which has grown uneasy with the monopolistic characteristics of Intel and its chief ally, Microsoft. Grove's level of participation in these issues is definitely declining, however. In 1996, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and although treatment was successful he began actively grooming a successor, Craig Barrett. In March of 1998, Grove stepped down as CEO, though he remains chairperson. Outside the corporate world, he teaches a class in the business school at Stanford University. A modest man, Grove commented in the Wall Street Journal, "One position says you ought to put some effort into making sure that people know what you do. The opposite is, look, you'll never get 100 percent credit, so just do your stuff. Advertising your achievements will probably make you look like a jerk anyway. I lean toward the second view."

Further Reading

Grove, Andrew S., High Output Management, Vintage, 1995.

Grove, Andrew S., One-On-One With Andy Grove: How to Manage Your Boss, Yourself, and Your Co-Workers, Penguin, 1989.

Grove, Andrew S., Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career, Currency Doubleday, 1996.

Grove, Andrew S., Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, Wiley, 1967.

Jackson, Tim, Inside Intel, Dutton, 1997.

Business Week, April 13, 1998.

Fortune, April 27, 1998; May 11, 1998.

Time, December, 1997, p. 46

U.S. News and World Report, April 6, 1998.

Intel Corp., "Executive Bio-Andrew S. Grove, " http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/bios/grove.htm (March 31, 1998).

Grove, Andrew (Andy) S

views updated May 29 2018

GROVE, ANDREW (ANDY) S.

Andrew S. Grove is the chairman of Intel Corp. He served the firm as president from 1979 to 1987, when he replaced Gordon Moore as CEO. During Grove's eleven-year tenure at the helm of Intel, he orchestrated the firm's pivotal shift from memory chips to microprocessors and grew Intel into the world's leading microprocessor maker, as well as one of the most profitable manufacturers on the globe. In May of 1998, Grove was succeeded as CEO by Craig Barrett. As chairman, Grove continues to work at Intel on a regular basis and remains an active participant in the firm's shift from central processing units (CPUs) to networking technology, including flash memory chips and cell phone processors, and Internet services, such as World Wide Web hosting.

A native of Budapest, Hungary, Grove earned his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering from City College of New York and his doctorate degree from the University of California at Berkeley. In 1967, Grove took a position as an assistant director in the research and development laboratory of Fairchild Semiconductor. The following year, when Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore established NM Electronicslater renamed Intel, from the first syllables of "integrated electronics"Grove helped the partners secure an office and set up manufacturing facilities. His official title was vice president of operations. Although Grove was not technically a founder of the firm, he was an instrumental player from the start, according to Fortune writer Brent Schlender. "It was he who masterminded Intel's pivotal 11th-hour marketing victory of Motorola to get the contract to supply microprocessors for IBM's landmark PC in 1979. Six years later, he was the one who made the gutsy and prescient decision to pull Intel out of the memory chip business, firing 6,000 employees in the process, and to focus the company on more lucrative microprocessors."

While driving Intel's growth as a CPU manufacturer, Grove also continued to teach at Stanford and published several books, including Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, a textbook used by many university professors after it was published in 1967; High Output Management, first published in 1983; One-on-One with Andy Grove, first published in 1987; and Only the Paranoid Survive, published in 1996. Grove also wrote several articles for Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal . Time magazine named him "Man of the Year" in 1997; that year, he also earned Industry Week 's "Technology Leader of the Year" award and CEO magazine's "CEO of the Year" distinction. By then, more than 80 percent of all personal computers (PCs) housed Intel CPUs, which were the fastest on the market.

Grove stepped aside for Craig Barrett just as personal computer growth began to slow. Although the Internet revolution played a major role in fueling Intel's success as growing numbers of consumers purchased PCs to access the Internet, it also eventually sparked technological developments that offered consumers alternative means of accessing the Internet. As a result, Intel began to reposition itself as a networking technology and Internet services provider. Although it was his successor who oversaw nearly $8.5 billion in acquisitions of communications and networking enterprises and the launch of World Wide Web hosting services, Grove continued to help steer the firm he is credited for parlaying into an industry powerhouse.

FURTHER READING:

Intel Corp. "Andrew S. Grove, Intel Corporation." Santa Clara, CA: Intel Corp., 2001. Available from www.andygrove.com/intel/people.

Roth, Daniel. "Craig Barrett Inside." Fortune, December 18, 2000.

Schlender, Brent. "The Incredible, Profitable Career of Andy Grove." Fortune, April 27, 1998.

. "Their Reign Is Over." Fortune, October 16, 2000.

SEE ALSO: Intel Corp.

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