Tag Archives: Robert Burgelman

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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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Warp Factor Ten: The New Cruise Control

“Here’s a tune that’s really moving fast. When I say fast, it was recorded at 9 o’clock this morning. At 12 noon, it was No. 15. At 3 o’clock, it was the No. 1 sound in town. And now it’s a golden oldie!” — George Carlin, FM & AM (1971)

What a difference a month makes. A week. Even a few hours.

Prior to its first day of public trading, Facebook was pure glamor. Individual investors who could not get into the IPO were camped out in the lobbies of retail brokerages. Where they couldn’t get shares prior to the first day open, some were moving cash into their accounts ready to buy at the commencement of trading. We loved Facebook, all 900 million of us with an account. We may have heard a bit of light background noise about how its advertising wasn’t working all that well for some clients like GM, or whether the company was making enough strides in mobile, but few people listened. It was frenzy. We had to have it. Then it all changed.

The question is, what changed? Did the facts change? Did the market conditions change? Did the technology change? In 24 hours? Sure, there were analyst reports that didn’t find their way to everyone, but how many individual minds would those have changed, for the people who had to have it? Not many, I suspect. One Wall Street Journal story that especially caught my attention noted: “… a 30-year-old actor in Toronto, bought 15 shares of Facebook on its opening day. Before then, he had bought just one stock, yet saw the market as a place to make his savings rise in the long run. Now he feels burned.”This fellow is upset, yet his investment strategy was to own two individual stocks in minimal quantities to increase his net worth. As they say on SNL, really?

For my mind battle, Facebook was as exciting and pioneering a company before the IPO as it was after—the critical question was whether enough people considered what its stock was actually worth. We like to believe in fundamentals, until we don’t. What changed was the hangover. We sobered up and asked the questions we should have asked after we acted. Opinion reversed in this instance to an unprecedented polar opposite, a trend we now see too often.

Around the turn of the millennium, we experienced astonishingly rapid adoption of the commercial internet. The public couldn’t wait to buy stock in this emerging set of companies. Earnings be damned, this was the new economy! We used new online brokerage platforms at our fingertips to day-trade nascent listings on something called momentum. About a year later came the dot-bomb implosion and we couldn’t dump these equities fast enough. As soon as mass opinion declared most of them worthless, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the mid 2000s, popular opinion declared home real estate values going in one direction, to the stratosphere. Credit was easy, because with prices rising, properties could be flipped quickly, debt retired and profits tabulated with presumed certainty. When home prices crested and credit markets began to freeze, homeowners found themselves “underwater,” owing more on properties than they were worth. It happened that fast. People asked themselves how a home they bought for $600,000 could be worth less than $200,000 when only a year ago it was assessed at $400,000. How did prices go up so quickly, then down so quickly, then lock up without some form of fair warning?

JP Morgan Chase escaped the mortgage-backed securities meltdown and CDO liquidity crisis largely unscathed, only to follow-up this year with a series of disastrous derivatives trades that resulted in billions of dollars in losses. The company’s CEO, James Dimon, went on record saying the bank’s strategy was “flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored.” Does that sound like a dependable financial institution gone temporarily astray, or a speculative gambling pit operating without normalized controls?

How do we make choices in a world where assessment can change this rapidly and radically? What is a grounded opinion?

Is the public manipulated? You bet we are. Witch’s brew opportunism is all around us. Are well-meaning individuals subject to baffling contradiction and confusion? To my knowledge it has never been any other way. The problem now is the fever pitch, the speed at which information and misinformation travels, the global pace of relentless throbbing that blinks and bubbles and burns and overwhelms our better judgment. We act because the parade is leaving town and the horns are blazing, not necessarily because we have decided it’s a good parade celebrating a cause we wish to trumpet. We don’t want to get left behind, until we too late discover there’s no place like home.

How fast is fast? In the original Star Trek series which debuted in 1966 and was set in the 24th century, Gene Roddenberry envisioned Warp Factor One as travel at the speed of light. Any kid who had taken high school physics got the joke, but for sheer late night discussion it seemed a decent enough way to talk about speed in the extreme. Warp Factor Ten was considered unachievable, a “purely theoretical” value, yet in the later sequels, Warp Factor Ten was used all the time, no big deal. I don’t think stretching of the metaphor over time was accidental. When fantasy portrays the speed of light no longer as a milestone, any definition of fast requires new parameters. I think we’re getting there, or at least the hyperbole is catching up with our perceived experiences that don’t involve beaming up our bodies, just harnessing some constancy in our opinions.

The 24 hour news cycle is well understood by those who create it, so much so that top public relations firms often suggest just waiting for a worse story to wipe out your current bad news. Rapid and seismic change has been a recurring theme in this blog since its launch, where the patron Pre-Socratic philosophers Parmenides and Heraclitus now have us wondering if you can even step in the same river once.

We like, we don’t like. We know we are fickle, but we allow conflicted voices all around us to vacuum us in one direction, then whiplash us in another. We become certain something is worth our hard-earned money, then we see our money vaporized and want it back. With all the experience we have around vast shifts in sentiment, why do we still allow ourselves to act before we have enough facts to make a reasonable judgment?

Robert Burgelman, one of my former board members who teaches business strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, likes to define the shift between strategic thinking and consequence as the moment when valuable resources are committed to action. In a company, that’s when you move from the planning and consideration phase of a project to the substantial deployment of capital—financial, material, and human. These decisions are not trivial. There are experts involved, and even then, too many times they are wrong. In your own life, it’s when you go from liking a company for what it does to investing your savings in an equity stake. That too is a big leap, one you want to think about very hard.

Indeed, creative destruction is a norm, we know we have to move fast or risk missing opportunity. How do we apply the essence of urgency, the realities of internet time, to factor out hype and not be shifted into a higher gear than makes sense?

For starters, don’t be afraid to take an extra breath. Be appropriately careful with your convictions. It’s admirable to be resolute, but if facts are going to be relative, how really certain can you be today when someone else with a vested interest is bound to change the story tonight? Living in a world where unformed argument too convincingly sells itself as conventional wisdom can make skepticism a virtue. I am not one to resist change, but when I listen to opinion, I want convincing debate, not anxious pressure. Opinions can be interesting, facts are better. When you don’t understand something, never let others make you feel inadequate because “You Don’t Get It” and the clock is not on your side. You might be getting it just fine.

Your pace of decision should be your own. If you don’t like the story, don’t buy the book solely because someone stacked the deck with a stockpile of boilerplate reviews. Opinions will keep changing at lightning pace. Anticipate change in the assessment of change; you can bet on that because you have evidence. Beyond that, there’s a reason they call it the cloud.

Facebook just might beam itself into a valuation you wish you could have seen coming. Mortals like us can no more see the future than travel at the speed of light. If you want to win long-term in a race against noise, listen more closely to what’s under the noise. Cruise control at top speed will never be as comfortable as the manual suggests.

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Eyes on HP

Hewlett-Packard is not just any company. It is iconic. Like Disney, Ford, General Electric, Apple, Microsoft, and a few others, it is not only part of business history, it is deeply wound into the fabric of American history. Modern Silicon Valley pretty much begins with Hewlett-Packard—the foundations of information technology as a new sector of productivity, the power of innovation, the hardware/software product life-cycle, the beginnings of west coast venture capital, and the splitting atom of employees spinning off from the mothership to become founders themselves. The Hewlett-Packard story until recently is a magnificent tale.

HP WayBill Hewlett and Dave Packard really did start in a garage. One of the very first products they sold was a precision audio oscillator, to of all people, Walt Disney. They captured their thoughts in a book, The HP Way, reinforcing the need for a company to have a mission and a vision. When we talk about a job being more than a paycheck, a lot of that comes from the work ethic and values of Hewlett and Packard. They set the stage for a generation of entrepreneurs. They made it okay to fail, as long as that failure contained learning that was honestly disseminated. HP on an engineer’s resume was gold. The sales and marketing team was second to none.

It is almost impossible to understand the impact of a global company with over $125B in annual revenue and 325,000 employees changing CEOs four times in six years, not including the interim CEOs between hires. Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, and Leo Apotheker each left the company for different reasons, and while the HP board is now taking a lot of heat for perhaps not scrutinizing their decisions around these leaders carefully enough, that is unfortunately water under the bridge. The company is now under the direction of former eBay CEO and recent California Gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who will need to move quickly and definitively to steady the ship.

HP has seen numerous mergers, divestitures, and acquisitions throughout this period of seismic change, and each time one strategy replaces a previous version, the impact is costly. Whitman has said she believes the strategy in place at HP now is largely correct, so if the issues she is facing are managerial, perhaps we will see a positive impact sooner rather than later. My guess is she will dig into strategy a bit more in the coming months, and then move aggressively to make her mark. The sooner she can restore confidence with customers, employees, and shareholders, the better it will be for all those who do care deeply about the company’s future.

Why is HP so important in the scope of business enterprise? When you dig into exceptional business books like Built to Last and Good to Great, both by Jim Collins, you realize just how hard it is for even the strongest corporations to go the distance in an environment of creative destruction. As Collins points out so often in the data he cites, only 62 of the original Fortune 500 companies named on the original list in 1955 remain there in 2011.

The great former CEO of Intel, Andy Grove, talks at length about the “strategic inflection points” facing companies at every stage of their evolution—particularly technology companies—in his critical study Only the Paranoid Survive. Grove makes it all too clear how easy it is for a well established organization with vast resources and expansive markets to miss a fundamental change in the continuum of progress, only to catch its error to late to be fixed, having been lapped by any number of competitors.

Where Collins approaches the challenge largely from the aspect of defining and reinforcing a brand, Grove looks at it from the point of view of ceaseless innovation and refusal to accept the status quo as satisfying. Both approaches are vital, but neither has a chance in the face of organizational chaos. Products, features, and benefits must remain in constant flux, but ideals and values are their balancing counterparts. Remove the rudder from a very fast ship and it really doesn’t much matter what is powering the engine room.

It takes both leadership and strategy to steer one of these mammoth ships through the rough seas of business change, and simply taking those notions for granted is the easiest way for a company to fall from grace. Robert Burgelman, a colleague of Andy Grove who teaches strategy at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (and is also a former board member of mine), tells us that strategy becomes real when we apply resources to concepts. We see that very much in action now at HP, but we see those resource decisions changing too frequently in real-time. The leadership of the CEO drives that strategy from concept to action, from white board idea to investment cost center, and if strategic shifts are reversed before cost centers become profit centers, value can be destroyed at an astonishing pace.

No CEO or strategy is meant to last forever, but change them too often, and costs pile up without reward. The toll on staff morale is immeasurable, and the lost jobs from reversing decisions may never be recovered. Employees feel the impact in loss of income, shareholders get pummeled. Customers just move on.

It’s time now for HP to turn the corner. As I said, HP is iconic, it is Silicon Valley. We need it as an example in the tech sector of a company that is Built to Last and can continue to grow from Good to Great. HP dates to 1939. It is the standard-bearer for all the great companies that followed its mantra, were born in garages, and now have office space in the adjacent neighborhoods. If we want to believe companies like AOL and Yahoo can find new creative life through reinvention, we have to have models for long-term success. We need succession plans that show great companies can transcend their founders and achieve new levels of success by ensuring that values are more than words in the employee handbook, and that they are liberating, not confining, as long as the leaders who embrace them help guide their teams through increased commitment to innovation with coherent planning and rigorous evaluation. No shooting from the hip, but no fear of change.

On a pragmatic level, we also need the jobs, particularly in HP’s home state of California. Surely the majority of new jobs in our nation will come from small business and startups, but we can’t afford to lose the ones we have in the enterprise, not for the families who depend on them, not for the state budget that needs the payroll tax. Because of its deep history in the community and legend, HP leads the ethos in Silicon Valley in so many ways, its stability is a reflection of hope, its instability a drag on the headlines when we need a shot of optimism.

This is a once in a lifetime career and company defining opportunity for the new CEO at HP. It’s like getting the chance to manage the NY Yankees after three bad seasons no one saw coming. They might be on a losing streak, they might have made a bunch of bad trades, but they’re still the Yankees. Everyone knows they can win, that they have the resources to win and a history of winning. Meg Whitman just needs to ask herself, what kind of game does she want her team playing, who does she want in the line-up, and where does she need to better read the competitive landscape. A little consistency in management will go a long way.

Let’s hope Hewlett-Packard has it right this time. There is already new criticism of HP’s board that they acted too quickly in hiring Meg Whitman, that she should have first been named interim CEO, or that her background is not right for the job. Their decision has been made, so I am rooting for the new CEO. This isn’t politics, this is P&L. It is critical that Meg gets this right and succeeds. A win for her in this role is a win for all of us.