Andrew Grove

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. Grove immigrates from Austria to the United States, where he lived in the Bronx with an aunt and uncle who had immigrated in the 1930s. 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. After graduation, he and his wife 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.

When Grove joined Intel in 1968, he was put to work managing the engineers who researched and developed semiconductors for Intel. 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. 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.

There was method to Grove's style, even though his approach to management superficially seemed to be leadership by intimidation. 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 more powerful chips. Grove approached these demands with a ruthlessness that characterized his entire management career. 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.

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.

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, 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.

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 by two years. Grove sought ever better ways to improve Intel's products and to cut production costs. But his refusal to believe that the Japanese companies were more efficient manufacturers than Intel set the company back. The Japanese fabs were, in fact, superior to most American