Tag Archives: Only the Paranoid Survive

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The Many Lessons of Andy Grove

Time 1997We lost a great business leader earlier this year. His name was Andrew S. Grove, known to many as Andy Grove.

He survived Nazi-occupied Hungary as a child, then Soviet-controlled Hungary, immigrating to the United States at the age of 20 in 1956.

He received a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from U.C. Berkeley and became a star engineer at Fairchild Semiconductor.

He left the stability of Fairchild Semiconductor with Silicon Valley legends Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore when they co-founded Intel. Together they later entirely reinvented Intel from a manufacturer of memory chips to the dominant producer of microprocessors.

He was Intel’s CEO from 1987 to 1998, the famous “Intel Inside” years when personal computing exploded from the hobby to the consumer market.

He wrote the legendary book Only the Paranoid Survive, published in 1996 and still a must-read for anyone who wants to understand innovation and the power of creative destruction.

For many years he co-taught a course in strategy with my dear friend Robert Burgelman at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

If you think everyday people always had the internet, email, streaming video, and smart phones, you have a loose grasp on current events, let alone history. Andy’s leadership at Intel took us from the 8086 to the Pentium chip, from monochrome to color displays, from floppy to CD disks, from no hard drive to software that could be installed.  If you didn’t live through the transformation of the universe from analog to digital, from buying hardware and software at Computerland and Electronics Boutique to Best Buy and Costco, it’s hard to explain the magnitude of this growth cycle. Andy is one of those guys who really changed the world.

Okay, you get the point, about 0.001% of mortal beings have a resume close to his. You can read his full bio on Wikipedia. I want to share something more personal about him, the key takeaways from the few times I met him in person during roadmap briefings at Intel in the 1990s. Among the many lessons I learned from Andy Grove, here are five that continue to guide me daily:

  1. Creative Destruction Is Real – Whatever product you ship today is already obsolete, no matter how well it is selling. If you are not working on the replacement for it, someone else is. That is why you have to be paranoid. You will always be correct if you presume you are about to be outperformed in the marketplace of goods and service. Never get comfortable, never rest on your laurels, or you will be gone in a heartbeat, wiped off the map while you are collecting your awards for last year’s success. I learned from Andy that almost every startup that presumes it is built to last is almost certainly on a crash course with obsolescence, that the vast majority of even robust corporations today last about half as long as a human life. Companies don’t reinvent themselves, they are reinvented by courageous, visionary people.
  2. Beware the Strategic Inflection Point – By the time a market has fully morphed at scale, it’s way too late to react. You can’t see a strategic inflection point coming, you can only acknowledge it in hindsight while confessing your memoirs. Sorry, Monsieur Business Plan, the landscape changes in real time! Because you have learned to be paranoid, you are going to figure out one dreary morning that something you are doing in your company is hugely wrong. Some product you are readying for release is going to tank no matter how much you spend on marketing. Remember when Bill Gates discovered the internet? Remember when Mark Zuckerberg discovered mobile? Those were Intel-inspired moments. They turned their companies on a dime the same way Andy helped turn Intel on a dime when they realized the market for memory chips had commoditized and microprocessors were the way forward. I learned from Andy to always remain nimble, that sunk cost is always sunk cost, eat it and move on. Achieving competitive advantage before others see it coming is where your investments must be all the time.
  3. Science Is Inescapable – No matter what your market cap might be, you can’t fake math. Pithy slogans don’t make better computers, engineers do. For Moore’s Law to work (roughly twice the computing power will be available every 12 to 24 months for the same cost) staggering volumes of calculations have to take place on a tiny silicon chip without the transistors melting down. If you want to win at the engineering game, it takes the boldest and brightest team of advanced engineers you can assemble. They need the time to do the math, which is why Intel was already designing the 486 chip while shipping the 286. You can’t predict when the equations will be solved, you can only form a thesis and test your working models until they clear quality assurance. I learned from Andy that there are no sustainable shortcuts in quantifiable outcomes, the minimum viable product be damned! If you try to cheap your way through a poorly constructed algorithm, science will have its way with you and the result won’t be a proud moment.
  4. Constructive Confrontation Works – A lot of people who didn’t grow up in the Intel culture found it an impossible place to survive. Intel was a place where undisciplined, random conversation was never the norm. Almost anything anyone said could be challenged directly and aggressively by anyone in the hierarchy. Even when you were visiting Intel as a channel partner, anything you said could get shoved down your throat as instantly as you said it. Was this nice? It wasn’t meant to be nice. It was meant to improve products, driving ceaselessly toward unattainable perfection. That was how Intel maintained design and manufacturing leadership for a generation, by always challenging assumptions, never accepting compromise or forging an unholy consensus simply to move on. It isn’t the right culture for everyone, but at Intel, you bought into it or got your walking papers. I learned from Andy that in constructive confrontation, it’s always the idea that gets attacked and never the person. You might feel that you are being attacked, but you aren’t. Your ideas are being made better or mercifully eviscerated.
  5. Resilience Is a Mandate – Imagine a guy who made it from the Holocaust to the highest level of American thought leadership—all the obstacles, all the challenges, all the knock-downs, all the reinvention. To embrace the example of Andy Grove is to embrace the notion of resilience as the single greatest motivator available to anyone at any stage of emergence. You don’t give up, you don’t give in, you don’t quit. You always expect more from yourself. You learn from your mistakes, you study your failures, you learn from your adversaries. Want to survive? Want to triumph? Want to leave a legacy? There is no other way. I learned from Andy that you stay in the game, you look forward at opportunity, and you try again—only harder. Resilience isn’t a nice-to-have. Resilience is fuel for the soul.

Andy was a living example of realizing possibility through discipline. It is extremely rare to find an innovator with startup DNA who can personally evolve into the CEO of a multinational corporation. It is equally rare to find a top-notch engineer who embraces consumer marketing as a key strategic initiative. Andy championed the “Intel Inside” campaign as a branding mechanism that made an otherwise invisible component a necessity for personal computer manufactures to tout. When the consumer press seized upon an obscure failing in a sample of Intel microprocessors, Andy accepted the criticism as a byproduct of his brand promise. He insisted his team correct the deficiency with renewed quality assurance rather than defend the company’s position with arguments the consumer would never understand. He was book smart, business smart, and street smart all at the same time. He gave back way more than he ever took off the table in every way imaginable.

If you ever worked on one of my teams, I probably bought you a copy of Only the Paranoid Survive and quizzed you on it a week later. Andy’s words, thoughts, and ideas remain that important to me. He was an industry icon and a human being impossible for me to forget. I hope none of us ever forgets Andy. He remains a truly one-of-a-kind inspiration.

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This article originally appeared on The Good Men Project.

Photo: Time Inc.

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Elon Musk Blows My Mind

I don’t know Elon Musk. I wish I did. This guy knows stuff. He’s the real deal.

MuskIf there is a possible next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, it could be him. He’s not goofing around with thin stuff that’s going to come and go. He already did consumer software engineering as his opening act as a cofounder of PayPal. With the massive payday he got from eBay for the sale of his company—a company that continues to operate as such an important platform it could someday be spun off again as an independent entity—he could have taken the path of least resistance and become an elder statesman of the industry, a board member, an investor, a wise individual of counsel. Not Elon Musk. He started not one subsequent company, but two—Tesla Motors and SpaceX—and leads both as CEO. He is also the CTO of SpaceX and the chief product architect of Tesla. Not exactly a path to retirement. He’s really, really changing the world.

I don’t know if he’s a nice guy. Like I said, I have never met him. But he is truly impressive and worth studying. Here are some perhaps not so obvious reasons why:

A real track record of repeat innovation.

A lot of people talk about being serial entrepreneurs. Elon Musk has pioneered three immensely important companies. The ability for an innovator to find repeat success in entirely new ventures is perhaps the rarest of proven attributes. Edison did it. So did Walt Disney and Steve Jobs. Musk made a mark in digital payment systems, then battery-powered automobiles and low-cost rocket propulsion. He didn’t start life as a rocket scientist, but he challenged himself to become one. Try to find a resume like his anywhere. I don’t think you can. He not only articulates a clear, bold vision, he leads from the front lines as a player-coach. He is simultaneously a thinker, a doer, and a peer-respected personal risk-taker with real skin in the game. He makes disruption make sense. That’s how you fire up a team and get results.

The work he does is important.

It was not clear to everyone in the first dot-com bubble that digital payments would be essential to our economy. Heck, most of us were lucky if we had a phone that could do email back then. PayPal opened our eyes. People have been betting against alternatives to fossil-fuel powered automobiles since the first suggestion of battery power on our roads. No matter how many failures it takes, we know that we can’t rely on the limited resource of petroleum forever. Space travel has been massively expensive, the province of federal bureaucracy and a very few goliath government contractors to date. We no longer have the luxury to spend endlessly on going into orbit and beyond, yet we know it is human destiny to explore our universe. All of this matters big time. Musk is actively pursuing a broad but selective set of challenges that he decides warrant his time and focus. This is real turf with lasting impact. It creates sustainable, well-paying jobs. Even when it fails, it moves the ball forward.

He is courageous and daring, but not reckless.

Earlier this year when Elon Musk was profiled on 60 Minutes, he said he was an engineer first. I do think he believes that, which is part of what makes him great, but even more than an engineer, even more than innovator, he is a pioneer. To be a pioneer in technology doesn’t just mean you have interesting ideas. It means you stand by your ideas and will them into being. Musk said in the 60 Minutes piece that with SpaceX he went “past strike 3 to strike 4,” not just betting the farm in failure, but staying with his conviction to the last test he could fund, even if it meant losing everything. He knew he was right, and if he wasn’t right, he needed to exhaust every resource at his disposal to make the case that he should have been right. When Musk recently faced a roadblock in submitting a competitive bid for a government contract controlled by Lockheed Martin and Boeing, he sued the federal government for the right to compete at substantially lower cost. Imagine the guts, to take on his own customer in a public forum, risking financial ruin for a principle. He won an injunction from a federal judge. Whether he ultimately prevails in winning the contract (and I think he will), there is little question that the price of that contract is coming down. Want to know how to get the government to think smarter about our tax money? I like this way.

He walks the walk, with standards that matter.

So much of what I write about on this blog—ideas like “good enough is not good” and “eat your own dog food”—are very hard to understand unless you have lived them. If you’re lucky in your career, you get to work for someone for a while who grinds this stuff into your brain until you literally cannot act any other way, no matter the stakes, no matter the challenges. If you don’t get a boss who inserts that chip into the back of your spinal cord, study Elon Musk. You can’t cut corners on quality with the work he tackles, or people die. Of course you’re going to say, Well, in automobiles and rockets, people do die. Sadly in the march of progress where new machinery does fail, there is no way around that no matter the commitment to extraordinary quality, but the question is, what is the ethos at the core of an enterprise? Is it profit first, a love letter to Wall Street with lip service to safety and excellence? Or is it a standard of safety and excellence that exists a priori to all other decision-making that of itself creates value? When I see Musk discuss failure or success in any public setting after something has gone wrong or right, I don’t worry that his statement has been pureed by a publicist. I see an engineer who knows winning means perfection, and as elusive as perfection remains, he is never self-satisfied, never standing on his laurels. What do you really need to say about a reusable rocket that leaps sideways and then lands on its launchpad? The Grasshopper speaks for itself.

Why write about Elon Musk?

In this never-ending discussion of whether we are in a tech bubble, I have grown weary of broad generalizations. If all we are worried about is whether the stock market is due for a correction, then we are wasting brain cycles on an inevitable head fake we cannot control, so why bother? Our world has an abundance of trendy apps, head-bobbing diversions, and flavor-of-the-month prognostications of what at the moment constitutes cool. You know what’s cool? Stuff that lasts, stuff that can have a lasting impact on growing our economy, stuff that makes scientific dreams into tangible realities, and stuff that in doing so makes investment capital make sense. Musk is doing that, which to me looks like real leadership, and it feels good to applaud him. I don’t care that he is a billionaire. I care that he is a creative leader, with half his life likely still ahead of him to teach us things we don’t know and take us places we couldn’t otherwise find.

As Andy Grove taught us decades ago, Only the Paranoid Survive. Somewhere along the ride, Elon Musk must have gotten the memo. He is probably rewriting it with some form of ink yet to be discovered.

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Brands In Memoriam 2012

Frequent readers of this blog know that I am obsessed with the concept of creative destruction, the intangible but daunting market force where an invention that is vital takes out that which has become defunct, and the nascent replaces the established. For those of you just stopping by, you will find any number of mentions of creative destruction as you page through my posts on innovation—it represents for me all that is true and real in deploying creativity to survive in business, perhaps best captured in the title of Andy Grove’s definitive book, “Only The Paranoid Survive.”

As a result of creative destruction, every year we add more once significant names to the Dead Brand Graveyard. Recent memory had us bid adieu to such iconic enterprises as Palm, Saab, Lehman Brothers, Zenith, Compaq, Borders, Circuit City, Ritz Camera, CompUSA, Mervyn’s, Friendster, Tower Records, Polaroid, and Kodak. I polled my network on Facebook for suggestions to include this year and got way more than I could include in a single blog post, many of which could be argued are still on the bubble; some have already quietly jumped the shark, others are still operating as near zombie brands, not yet coming to terms with their imminent vaporization. I invite those dear friends who offered their suggestions to include them in the comments below—as well as anyone else who can see what is certain to end badly—as internal politics and stagnating ideas cause those who should know better to obscure the mandate of leadership.

Here then are my top label farewells for the current calendar year:

Continental Airlines Logo Circa 1940sContinental Airlines: As a result of the merger between United and Continental, the marketing folks did the right thing and picked one brand to make it easier to find your tail logo on the runway. Was anything really lost if this was just a merger? Ask the people (like me) still stuck flying United—yeah, the customer experience did the impossible and took another plunge. If you aren’t 1K at this point in your frequent flyer status, melt down your Premier Card, there are so many top dogs in the system the rest of us matter not, kiss upgrades goodbye. Choice on routes? Funny how the routes and times keep getting de-duped. It’s ironic that an industry that flies you around in the sky at 500 mph and largely invented the modern loyalty program today can’t come up with more clever ways to achieve growth than eliminating its own competition—plus five extra inches of leg room, baggage checks, and those yummy inflight box lunches are now upsells. The parade of eliminated airline brands welcomes another, while customers fume with rising prices and deteriorating service. Hard to believe this is a path to long-term health and improved profits in a backbone industry our economy needs to thrive.

Fresh & Easy: This expansion into the USA didn’t go so well for UK grocery titan Tesco. Any ideas why? Been in one? Okay, that’s a good start. Here’s another—where was the segmentation analysis? Same prices and quality as the giant American supermarkets like Safeway, but a smaller footprint and thus fewer shelf offerings. Same footprint and attempted laid back environment as Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, but no real upscale inventory warranting premium prices or nice people to kibitz with you at checkout. No meaningful differentiation to be found, and small parking lots, too. Ready made portions for young working professionals weren’t a home run in a market with as much choice and variety as ours. Head on competition with Wal-Mart—which can operate at scale near 3% net income while it’s strategically expanding in the grocery category—was a capital-intensive bet inclusive of acquiring real estate and building new stores, a tough play requiring far-ranging commitment and vision to warrant the pain. Without either, Tesco cut its losses and retreated.

Newsweek: This one is spiritually sad for us old school hard news and analysis junkies, except that I cannot remember when I last touched a copy of this magazine, even in a dentist’s office. Bought in 2010 from The Washington Post by audio magnate Sid Harman for $1 and assumption of the losses, ostensibly for sentimental reasons, it was then merged via IAC with The Daily Beast and put under the direction of star editor Tina Brown (there’s a cost saving measure, huh?). Circulation and ad rates for the print version of Newsweek never regained momentum sufficient to cover costs, so this year we heard announcement that the print edition is ceasing. Can Newsweek digital-only survive as a differentiated masthead next to The Daily Beast? Can you imagine a good reason to continue two separate editorial teams? Can you imagine the same editorial team producing two presumably different publications? Have you tried to sell display advertising lately for vertical online editorial products? And just what is a News-Weekly in the age of internet microsecond breaking info copy? At 79 years on the newsstands and in mailboxes, Newsweek had a good run, it just stopped evolving.

Hostess: It seems obvious to many that the sub-brands of 85-year-old Hostess will live on post the uber bankruptcy, and there will be some snack distributor out there continuing to put Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs on grocery store shelves everywhere (other than Fresh & Easy, see above). The master brand is likely to die with the corporate entity, as executive management was unable to make a deal with the labor union representing the workers who made the Twinkies, Ho-Hos, and Ding-Dongs. So 18,000 people lost their jobs because no deal could be reached between managers and workers? I don’t think that’s the whole story. Try a balance sheet too weak to support internal investment after emerging from a prior bankruptcy with private equity imposed debt and mounting unfunded pension obligations. The real culprit in my mind—you got it, thinner margins and declining market share due to lack of innovation. Hostess management—now asking for bonuses in liquidation—failed to bring relevant new products to market in a climate where obesity and diabetes became part of the vernacular. Wonder Bread may have been the greatest thing since… whatever came before it, but not in a world of seven grain all natural high fiber baked fresh daily, sliced thick and thin or not at all, your choice.

Blackberry: I am going out on a limb here, calling the magnificent former high-flier from Research in Motion dead even though launch of a new platform has been loaded into the cannons for ignition. Why do I say it’s gone with two new Blackberry’s rolling out as soon as next month? As noted in the Wall Street Journal last week, “Consulting firm IDC recently estimated that RIM’s share of the global smartphone market stands at 4.7%, down from 9.5% at this time last year and from more than 50% in 2009.” Sorry, but when a company has less than 10% of the market share it had three years ago, I am not sure how you could classify a recovery as anything more than a dangling lifeline. What went wrong? Ever try to use the Blackberry browser? There is no word in our language of which I am aware to adequately modify the word slow. With an extremely late to market touchscreen interface, where was the incentive for app developers to develop apps? Those of you who know me know my devotion to the thumb driven analog keyboard, but when I tossed it in for an iPhone 5, I knew the rest of the thumbers were coming too.

There were a number of brands suggested by my colleagues as sighted on death watch, but I’ll let those opinion makers chime in themselves and go out on their own limbs as I did with Blackberry. I have my suspicions about who might be on deck for next year’s list, but I will keep those sealed for now in a paper envelope so as not to publicly curse them or too soon embarrass myself for being wrong. Some in the soon to be gone circle I still like and am hoping for a comeback, though not many.

I think I may make this an annual feature. History would suggest I won’t have much trouble coming up with a list each year. Why chronicle the abdicated? Creative destruction is permanently embedded in our business culture, and even the greatest company can be gone in a single product cycle if customers aren’t understood to be our ultimate boss. With constraints on distribution forever less a moat and abundant technology a ceaseless path to increased consumer choice, business leadership requires nimble execution, unending responsiveness, and gracious humility to constantly win anew customer loyalty. It’s a lesson we all need front and center to do our jobs honestly and well: Innovate quickly or die.

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Don’t Fear the Fad

As an investor, can you ever know for certain if that newfangled gizmo come to market is the real deal or a fad?

Let’s try it a different way—perhaps everything is a fad, until it’s proven otherwise.

Bread, most likely not a fad. But organic fair-market nine-grain soft crust, probably a fad.

Cars, probably not a fad. But eight-cylinder 130 mph muscle mobiles with no back seats could be a fad.

AM radio, possibly a fad, but one that has enjoyed a long shelf life—and now with news and sports retransmitted over the internet to mobile devices, probably a decent bit of runway left in the broadcast machine.

Farmville, Mafia Wars, and their brethren? You tell me.

Our attention spans are surely fickle, but just because something is a fad does not necessarily make it a bad investment. I am not certain internet keyword search will last forever, but the last decade and a half have proven pretty rewarding, at least for one company that currently commands better than 70% market share. Games? That’s where they come and go in a coughing breath—if you are going to bet at that crap table, come with a lot of chips and a jug of Pepto-Bismol.

The question of whether it makes sense to bet on a fad in a commercial, accelerated, low-loyalty, short-attention-span, vastly diverse, market-driven global economy seems moot. People have bet against railroads, phones, airlines, television, personal computers, and even guitar bands as fads—and that was before they had customers! Even after these “fads” had momentum, there were endless naysayers who said they were on their way out as fast as they’d found their way in. With that kind of outlook, eventually you have to be right, but you may be staring up at daisy roots when you finally win your bet.

There is tremendous Monday morning quarterbacking now about the dive in Web 2.0 companies, from Facebook to Zynga to Groupon to Pandora. Maybe they are all fads, but let’s separate the fad of stock market performance from the fad of consumer adoption as two separate issues. The shine may be off the stock, or the shine may be off the company’s products, but those are very different things. High-growth speculative stocks like these are most often valued on future earnings potential, not current performance, so if the stock is out of favor, that does not de facto mean the product or service has gone out of favor. Plenty of people are enjoying these consumables at the moment, though it is safe to say that they won’t all be in vogue for eternity. Styles change, tastes change, brand loyalties change. We know that to be Creative Destruction, an ever-present cycle, so when we criticize either an equity or a product as being a fad, let’s be careful to make the distinction, and even more careful not to level broad sweeping judgment that could lead to missed opportunity.

Can a company make money riding the wave of a fad? Seems to me that is more norm than anomaly. Can an investor make money owning the stock of a company that rides the wave of a fad without volatile exposure to market timing? Again this seems perfectly reasonable, depending on the window. Think Intel with micro-processing chips during the PC revolution, Electronic Arts with the rise of sports-based video games led by Madden NFL, and today’s True King of All Media, Apple. Equity markets in the long run reward smart risk and punish reckless risk, just as commercial markets reward desirable consumer offerings and reject cynical ones. There has to be risk for there to be reward or no one would invest, so the question is not whether something is a fad, but whether that fad represents some potential form of continuity recognized by visionary management as one in a string of ventures that together comprise opportunity.

Intel’s legendary former CEO Andy Grove clearly taught us, “Only the Paranoid Survive.” He knew at any strategic inflection point the difference between a fad and a trend was largely the expanse of the product life cycle. More importantly, he worried about management culture as the path to product culture, where innovation means never-ending creativity, not tossing the dice and getting lucky on a good roll. I don’t worry whether a company is profiting from a fad, I expect companies to be opportunistic. I worry whether the company is a one-trick pony, whether it has created a learning culture where success and failure are both studied. A company that has learned to learn, that can read data and understand how fads are perpetuated as trends that constitute periodically sustained disruptions—that is a company that can extract true shareholder value from a fad, foremost by surprising and delighting customers repeatedly with that which they never expected was possible.

I have a lot of criticism about this year’s poor performing new entries in the NASDAQ, but that criticism has nothing to do with whether those companies were beneficiaries of identified fads now assessed by pundits to be in decline. My own career has been the beneficiary of any number of fads that came and went—computer games that sold millions and now barely qualify as second round questions on Jeopardy, once immensely cool websites that scored millions of visits that no longer can be found, virtual communities that ranked with the best in loyalty and now would be lucky to make the card draw on Trivial Pursuit. Does that mean they weren’t good businesses that added significant value to their owners? To the contrary, in their useful lives they added exceptional shareholder value in earnings and lifetime contribution. We worked the brand promises as long as we could, but when their time was done, we moved on.

That’s why a sweeping statement like “don’t invest in fads” makes little sense, because if virtually everything is a fad with varying sustainability, there is no choice but to invest in fads. What I worry about is management vision, how the brand stewards of a company are migrating from one fad to the next, how maneuvering through Creative Destruction is an art and science unto itself. Edison did it over a very long period of time. So did Steve Jobs. The folks who run television networks have to do it, because no show lasts forever and formats are cyclical; yesterday’s Variety Shows are today’s Reality Shows, half-hour comedy goes in and out of style, so does one-hour drama. Walt Disney famously bet the ranch on 2D feature animation, clearly a fad, although one he created and that lasted more than 50 years—but that wasn’t the only trick he had in the magic shop, not even close. To invest wisely in the likelihood that originators can capitalize on a string of fads through creativity and experimentation is very different from investing in one hot rocket that goes straight up with full knowledge that gravity will send it back down with equal and opposite thrust.

As the contemplative George Harrison reminds us, All Things Must Pass. That doesn’t mean windows of opportunity aren’t always in abundance. Watch the fad-makers, not the fads themselves, and the game changes significantly. While even the best fad-makers can’t call winners forever, those longer windows leave plenty of room for upside, especially when you bet the full spectrum of an index rather than trying to call the hits in isolation. If you bet on a one-trick pony and lose your bait, that was most likely your mistake, not that you bet on a fad.