Andy Grove famous quotes

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.
-- Andy Grove

#Business #Failure #Inspire

Leaders have to act more quickly today. The pressure comes much faster.
-- Andy Grove

#Technology #Leader #Today

There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level of performance. Miss that moment - and you start to decline.
-- Andy Grove

#Missing You #Business #Next Level

It's not enough to make time for your children. There are certain stages in their lives when you have to give them the time when they want it. You can't run your family like a company. It doesn't work.
-- Andy Grove

#Running #Children #Giving

I was glad I liked chemistry.
-- Andy Grove

#Chemistry #Glad

Congress will pass a law restricting public comment on the Internet to individuals who have spent a minimum of one hour actually accomplishing a specific task while on line.
-- Andy Grove

#Technology #Law #Tasks

I think Amazon is the preeminent pioneer in building a new way of doing commerce: personalized, database-driven commerce, where the big value is not in the purchase fulfillment, but in knowing as much about a customer base of ten or twenty million people as a corner store used to know about a customer base of a few hundred. In today's mass-merchandising world, that's largely gone; Amazon is trying to use computer technology to re-establish it.
-- Andy Grove

#Thinking #Technology #Knowing

Not all problems have a technological answer, but when they do, that is the more lasting solution.
-- Andy Grove

#Technology #Answers #Problem

How well we communicate is determined not by how well we say things but how well we are understood.
-- Andy Grove

#Communication #Determined #Communicate

Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.
-- Andy Grove

#Change #Reign #Chaos

You have to pretend you're 100 percent sure. You have to take action; you can't hesitate or hedge your bets. Anything less will condemn your efforts to failure.
-- Andy Grove

#Self Confidence #Effort #Action

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.
-- Andy Grove

#Technology #Fundamentals #Done

You have to understand what it is that you are better at than anybody else and mercilessly focus your efforts on it.
-- Andy Grove

#Focus #Effort

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.
-- Andy Grove

#Good Company #Crisis #Great Company

Make mistakes faster.
-- Andy Grove

#Mistake #Making Mistakes #Faster

Privacy is one of the biggest problems in this new electronic age.
-- Andy Grove

#Age #Privacy #Problem

So give me a turbulent world as opposed to a quiet world and I'll take the turbulent one.
-- Andy Grove

#Giving #World #Quiet

You need to plan the way a fire department plans: it cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.
-- Andy Grove

#Team #Fire #Shapes

By the late '90s, those who were paying attention perceived the Internet as a 20-foot tidal wave coming, and we are all in kayaks.
-- Andy Grove

#Feet #Attention #Internet

The Lesson is, we all need to expose ourselves to the winds of change
-- Andy Grove

#Wind #Needs #Lessons

If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry
-- Andy Grove

#Jobs #World #Hungry

Every generation thinks that they invented sex.
-- Andy Grove

#Sex #Thinking #Generations

Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC.
-- Andy Grove

#Sunset #Technology #Internet

Most Americans probably aren't aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed.
-- Andy Grove

#Country #Tanks #Pennsylvania

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.
-- Andy Grove

#Business #Focus #Skins

The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand. It doesn't magically allow you to build businesses by turning investors' money into operating expenses indefinitely. The money always runs out eventually.. the Internet doesn't change that, as we have seen.
-- Andy Grove

#Change #Running #Demand

The new environment dictates two rules: first, everything happens faster; second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else, somewhere.
-- Andy Grove

#Change #Two #Done

I'm a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet.
-- Andy Grove

#Change #Order #Internet

I have been quoted saying that, in the future, all companies will be Internet companies. I still believe that. More than ever, really
-- Andy Grove

#Business #Believe #Internet

Technology happens, it's not good, it's not bad. Is steel good or bad?
-- Andy Grove

#Positive #Technology #Steel

Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment, you shouldn't let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.
-- Andy Grove

#Time #Office #Pieces

With all due respect to Microsoft and Intel, there is no substitute for being in the right place at the right time.
-- Andy Grove

#Business #Luck #Microsoft

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.
-- Andy Grove

#Winning #Technology #Delay

You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.
-- Andy Grove

#Two #Choices #World

I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly
-- Andy Grove

#Real #Thinking #Two

The future is going to take care of itself, like it always has
-- Andy Grove

#Care #Take Care

No problem is so complicated that you cannot make it more complicated.
-- Andy Grove

#Problem #Complicated #No Problem

If the brutal facts are not faced by leaders, the brutal reality sets in.
-- Andy Grove

#Reality #Leader #Facts

Pickups, S.U.V.'s, vans and the like represent about 80 million vehicles, with mileage of perhaps 13 to 16 miles per gallon. Converting those should be our first priority.
-- Andy Grove

#Priorities #Firsts #Should

Growth is kinda built into everyone's genes. It's built into management's genes, the salesman's genes, the investors' desires. People expect companies to grow.
-- Andy Grove

#People #Growth #Desire

The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example.
-- Andy Grove

#Healthy #Example #Dollars

Accept that no matter where you go to work, you are not an employee you are a business with one employee, you. Nobody owes you a career. You own it, as a sole proprietor.
-- Andy Grove

#Business #Careers #Matter

There are two options: adapt or die.
-- Andy Grove

#Change #Two

Assume any career move you make won't go smoothly. They won't. But don't look back.
-- Andy Grove

#Inspirational #Moving #Careers

The sad news is, nobody owes you a career. Your career is literally your business. You own it as a sole proprietor. You have one employee: yourself. You need to accept ownership of your career, your skills and the timing of your moves.
-- Andy Grove

#Moving #Skills #Careers

A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal.
-- Andy Grove

#Careers #Journalism #Lost

I wasn't cut out to be an opera singer, but it was a nice fantasy for a teenager growing up in Hungary during the Stalinist era.
-- Andy Grove

#Growing Up #Nice #Teenager

Only the paranoid survive.
-- Andy Grove

#Paranoid

The Internet doesn't change everything. It doesn't change supply and demand.
-- Andy Grove

#Demand #Internet #Supply And Demand

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.
-- Andy Grove

#People #Littles #Achieve