Only the Paranoid Survive

by Andrew S. Grove

We were—and still are—trying to shape our future at a time when this idea doesn’t have broad currency. We were—and are—trying to be early movers.

times of strategic transformation is, should you pursue a highly focused approach, betting everything on one strategic goal, or should you hedge?

hard to lead an organization

Hedging is expensive and dilutes commitment.

most die because they don’t commit themselves.

Clarity of direction, which includes describing what we are going after as well as describing what we will not be going after, is exceedingly important at the late stage of a strategic transformation.

The time to issue marching orders—exquisitely clear marching orders—to

How do you role-model a strategy? By showing your interest in the elements that lead to the strategic direction, by getting involved in the details that are appropriate to the new direction and by withdrawing attention, energy and involvement from those things that don’t fit. Overcorrect

Ask yourself the questions, “Will going to this meeting teach me about the new technology or the new market that I think is very important now? Will it introduce me to people who can help me in the new direction? Will it send a message about the importance of the new direction?”

Give a lot of speeches to your employees, go to their workplaces, get them together and explain over and over what you’re trying to achieve. (Take

Yet I think it would be far better to let your employees find them when there’s still time to make corrections than to allow the marketplace to find them later.

One caveat: if your message is clear, it will provoke questions and responses which will come back to you through the same medium. Answer them.

Be crisp and to the point, and your response will help move the thinking of employees toward the desired direction.

The interactive element, the give-and-take, the opportunity to ask the “Does it mean that…” type of question is lost in

Resist the temptation to do what’s easy here. Communicating strategic change in an interactive, exposed fashion is not easy. But it is absolutely necessary.

I’m saying that they themselves, every one of them, needs to change to be more in tune with the mandates of the new environment.

seems that companies that successfully navigate through strategic inflection points have a good dialectic between bottom-up and top-down actions.

The best results seem to prevail when bottom-up and top-down actions are equally strong.

The best quadrant to be in is the top right one—strong top-down and strong bottom-up actions roughly balancing.

But our questions, which were largely nitpicky, didn’t even hint at strategic directions.

organization that has a culture that can deal with these two phases—debate (chaos reigns) and a determined march (chaos reined in)—is a powerful, adaptive organization.

tolerates and even encourages debate.

It is capable of making and accepting clear decisions, with the entire organization then supporting the decision.

The other side of the valley of death represents a new industry order that was hard to visualize before the transition.

Getting through the strategic inflection point required enduring a period of confusion, experimentation and chaos, followed by a period of single-minded determination to pursue a new direction toward an initially nebulous goal.

The idea was to provide a means of communication that could survive a nuclear explosion that might take down the country’s ordinary telephone infrastructure.

networks of all the computers on the Internet as forming a “connection co-op.”

in any good co-op,

people acting in their own self-interest act in the interests of the whole.

The first was the fact that personal computers were being improved and upgraded to

The second was that a researcher at CERN (a European nuclear research organization) named Tim Berners-Lee developed a means of linking the data on one computer to the data on any other computer in a way that made it extremely simple for a computer

the ongoing evolution of interconnected networks, the presence of large numbers of personal computers on local area networks that could be connected to the bigger network via a “universal gauge,” the spread of multimedia to personal computers and the Berners-Lee search method.

the data traffic on the Internet represents a more cost-effective, commodity-like method of connection than a traditional telephone call.

Another phenomenon affecting the software business is that the Internet provides a brand-new foundation on which software can be designed. This foundation doesn’t care about

The information on the Internet would need to be made as appealing as the programming on traditional media today.

Our product could be commoditized. And that’s not the only threat on the horizon.

All this suggests that the Internet is not a strategic inflection point for Intel. But while the classic signs suggest it isn’t, the totality of all the changes is so overwhelming that deep down I think it is.

We set up a hands-on course for our senior managers and for our sales force, where they get to experience the current status of the World Wide Web first-hand. The hope is that this course will fill in the background bit by bit without confronting people with their ignorance point-blank.

there any lessons from how corporations handle cataclysmic change that can be applied to individual careers?

Your career is literally your business, and you are its CEO. Just like the CEO of a large corporation,

The transition this time was not as traumatic, mainly because he initiated it in his own time, unlike the previous time, when the change was initiated for him by outside circumstances.

Simply put, be a little paranoid about your career.

Do these anecdotes indicate changes that might somehow apply to you? How would an important change manifest itself in your situation? Would you know about such changes from the kind of business information that you routinely get from your company? Would you be able to predict that changes like this are coming your way from your company’s financial performance? Can you bring up your concerns with your boss?

You need to cultivate the habit of constantly questioning your work situation. By examining the tacit assumptions underlying your daily work, you will hone your ability to recognize and analyze change.

Are you picking up on the portents that something may be changing? Have you already anticipated a change and prepared for it? Or are you waiting until the signs are incontrovertibly clear before you make your move? The stages of dealing with a career

Furthermore, if you are among the first to take advantage of a career inflection point, you are likely to find the best pick of the opportunities in your new activity. Simply

you experiment, avoid random motion. Don’t just take blind steps in directions whose only common characteristic is that they are different from what you are presently doing.

is very important to visualize what you want to achieve before you start to traverse the career equivalent of the valley of death.

What do you think the nature of your industry is going to be in two or three

this an industry you want to be a part of? Is your employer in a good position to succeed in this industry? What skills do you need to progress in your career in this new landscape? Do you have a role model of the...