Top 79 Quotes & Sayings by Andy Grove

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.

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.

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.

Only the paranoid survive.

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

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

I was running an assembly line designed to build memory chips. I saw the microprocessor as a bloody nuisance.

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.

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

I've had a wonderful life. What people are going to write about me 10 years after I'm dead - who cares?

I was glad I liked chemistry.

I did not want to become a poster child for yet another disease.

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.

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

When a change in how some element of one's business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off.

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

A career in journalism suddenly lost its appeal.

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.

We are now living on Internet time. It's a new territory, and the cyber equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush is on.

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

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.

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

I really don't have much respect for the people who live their lives motivated by an exit strategy existing, being performed. There was no option that we were trained in that says, 'If it gets too hard, get up and leave.'

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

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.

There are so many people working so hard and achieving so little.

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

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

Detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest stage possible.

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.

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

There's a tendency at the senior and middle-manager level to be too big-picturish and too superficial. There is a phrase, "The devil is in the details." One can formulate brilliant global strategies whose executability is zero. It's only through familiarity with details - the capability of the individuals who have to execute, the marketplace, the timing - that a good strategy emerges. I like to work from details to big pictures.

The future is going to take care of itself, like it always has.

There are two options: adapt or die.

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.

Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.

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

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

A question that often comes up at times of strategic transformation is, should you pursue a highly focused approach, betting everything on one strategic goal, or should you hedge? ... Mark Twain hit it on the head when he said, Put all of your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.

Activity is not output.

PCMCIA - People can't memorize computer industries acronyms

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.

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.

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.

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

Make mistakes faster.

You need just the right amount of ambition . . . If you have too little ambition, you don't push or work hard. If you have too much ambition, you put yourself ahead of others, elbow them out of your way.

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.

The most important role of managers is to create environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in marketplace.

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.

Girls don't think boys' games are too hard, they think they are stupid.

How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?

The worse the news, the more effort should go into communicating it.

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

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

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.

Most companies don't die because they are wrong; they die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.

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.

I believe in the value of paranoia. Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.

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