"Not just bifurcate,” Andy Grove said, explaining
That was in 1997 and one of the first times I interviewed the former Intel CEO who died earlier today at age 79. But in many ways, it contained three vital lessons that made Grove an instrumental leader for both Intel and the tech industry.
And those lessons are:
Stay Cool Under Pressure. A bunch of us in the press pit noted that Grove was being unusually talkative and congenial that day. He didn’t run away after his keynote and, during the impromptu Q&A, there was a veritable dearth of blunt, surly responses.
Was he dying? retiring?
A day later, we got at least a partial explanation: the Federal Trade Commission announced it was investigating the company’s trade practices.
It was a great performance.
Grove was part of Intel's leadership team during some of the most challenging times. He was part of the management team in 1985 when Intel got out of memory to concentrate on microprocessors. He was in charge when the company launched the disastrous Itanium strategy and oversaw the Pentium Bug fiasco.
In his books and interviews, he admitted he continually worried about complacency and failure. But publicly he didn’t shrink and that confidence, to some degree, gave Intel an aura that became a competitive edge.
Leaders Need to be Emotional. Grove had a legendary temper and he could berate people for showing up late to work. But people who worked with him always held him in high regard. He gave off an undeniable charisma. He was funny. One former Intel exec described him as the person you would “follow up a hill in battle.”
It’s tough to imagine anyone saying that about Paul Otellini.
Personality and charisma can be vastly overrated—look at what happened when investors swooned over Better Place’s Shai Agassi—but draws people in and keeps them loyal. Some of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies like
Don’t Be Afraid of the Future. The 1997 discussion revolved around whether or not Intel would produce microprocessor for desktops that cost less than $1,000. Believe it or not, that was a serious debate back then. Some analysts theorized that it would cheapen the brand and cut margins.
Grove felt it was inevitable. To preserve margins, the company created Celeron, the budget line of processors that ran at lower speeds and came with less cache. Despite rough patches here and there, Intel has maintained its 90-ish percent market share since.
After his retirement he became a staunch advocate for investments in health technology, batteries and growing more tech jobs in the U.S. Some of his predictions for the future have yet to occur. In 2009, he predicted that U.S. auto makers would fall woefully behind in batteries for EVs. EV sales haven’t taken over the world and the most successful company, Tesla, is based in the U.S. Still, he had a point: energy storage will likely become one of the growth industries of the next decade.
And then there was the time he called the end of the Internet era. It came on a press dinner on February 14, 2000, at the peak of the Web 1.0 bubble. Those who have made money have already made it, he thundered. Everyone else will lose.
So nobody missed the point, he said it several times.
The amazing part was that few, if any of us, actually published his comments. We were all still believers in the future. The stock market, in fact, went up the next day. How do I recall? After his discussion, I went back to my computer and put a sell order on all of my CNET stock options at last night’s closing price of $54 a share. Instead, it shot up to $67. I couldn’t find any stories on the wire about Andy Grove predicting the end of the universe. The rest of us somehow were still believers apparently.
“I shall have my revenge,” I vowed standing in my boxer shorts shaking my fist in rented condo in Palm Springs.
Three months later CNET was at $13. I should have sent him a thank you note.
