Starting and building
Andy Grove
Strategic inflection point
Andy Grove (1936–2016 · Budapest to Intel) — Strategic inflection point.
What actually happened?
He was born in Budapest in 1936 to a Jewish family, survived the Holocaust as a small boy living under a false name, and at twenty escaped a Hungary under Soviet control, arriving in America with almost no English. He took a doctorate in chemical engineering, joined Intel as its third employee, and ended as the chief executive who cut the business the company had been built on. The alertness people later read as a management style was not learned in business. It is the residue of a childhood spent noticing early what the adults noticed late.
The new chief executive test
In 1985 he asked Gordon Moore what a new chief executive brought in to replace them would do. Moore said, get us out of memories. Grove said, then why don't we walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves. What blocks the decision is never information. It is attachment.
Neither Kodak nor Nokia lacked people who could see the trend. Kodak invented the digital camera. What was missing was somebody able to cut into who we are.
Strategic inflection points
One of the forces around a business moves by a factor of ten, the old rules stop applying, and nobody sends a notice. The frightening part is that the beginning looks exactly like an ordinary bad quarter. By the time it is unambiguous in the numbers, the choice is no longer yours.
To judge whether something is a tenfold change for an industry, ask whether it alters the cost structure or only the interface. The first rewrites the rules; the second is a new skin.
Bad news has to travel faster than good
Somebody always feels the change first, and they sit near the customer, not near the board. The question is what happened to the last person who brought bad news. If they were quietly frozen out, everybody who saw it next learned to be quiet.
Snow melts first at the periphery. In a review, ask who noticed first, whether they said so, and what happened to them next.
A manager's output is the output of everyone he touches
It is the output of the organisation under him plus that of the organisations he influences. How much he did himself counts for nothing; only how much he multiplied counts. Which leaves three high-leverage activities — training, one-to-ones and decisions — and very little else.
A ninety-minute one-to-one covers a fortnight of somebody's work. Run as a status report, it has only the value of a status report.
How do I use it today?
Once a quarter, run the new chief executive test on yourself. If somebody landed in your seat tomorrow with no attachment to anything you have built, what would they cut in the first week and what would they double? Write both lists, then answer honestly why you are not doing it. The answer is rarely the timing.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Only the paranoid survive.
A strategic inflection point looks at first like a bad quarter.