WITH MALCOLM NETBURN
Stay Paranoid:
Top Survival Insights from Intel’s Andrew Grove, Part 1
Malcolm Netburn
Chairman and CEO of CDS Global

FORWARD: with Malcolm Netburn February 2013
Stay Paranoid:
Top Survival Insights from Intel’s Andrew Grove, Part 1
Intel’s former CEO Andrew Grove sits among business’s most eminent leaders. Grove’s highly
celebrated business book, Only the Paranoid Survive, offers an intimate account of Intel’s darkest
hour. It was the mid-‘90s when Intel was forced to innovate or perish. The once rapidly successful
semiconductor startup faced unexpected, overwhelming competition, a severely disrupted market
and a team of bewildered, disheartened employees in desperate need of clear direction.
Grove sat at the fore of Intel during its passage through the “valley of death” and, remarkably,
managed to transform Intel into the famed microprocessor manufacturer it is known as today. In
this two-part guide, key quotes from Only the Paranoid Survive are arranged to deliver Grove’s most
crucial lessons for dealing with disruption, innovation and change management.
Part 1 offers essential insights for discerning between common changes and truly monumental
change – change that, if left undetected, is positioned to forcibly upset your entire business.
1. Strategic Inflection Points
2. Helpful Cassandras
3. Six Forces Affecting Business
4. The 10X Change
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FORWARD: with Malcolm Netburn February 2013
1. Strategic Inflection Points
At some point in every organization’s lifespan, it will be confronted with a dilemma: what used to
work no longer can. Grove calls this juncture a strategic inflection point, an analogy taken from the
mathematical term that defines the exact point where a curve changes its directional sign. The shift
required to continue on is immense – if not impossible. Undergoing this shift is, according to Grove,
likened to passing through the valley of death.
The Strategic Inflection Point
Business Reaches
New Heights
Inflection Point
Business Declines
– Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove
Below are key comments from Grove that will help you to recognize when your company meets a
strategic inflection point and how to psychologically prepare for what lies ahead.
A strategic inflection point is a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about
to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as
likely signal the beginning of the end.
An inflection point occurs where the old strategic picture dissolves and gives way to the new,
allowing the business to ascend to new heights. However, if you don’t navigate your way
through an inflection point, you go through a peak and after the peak the business declines.
You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version.
… Consequently, you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality
of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product
or technology.
The trouble was, not only didn’t we realize that the rules had changed – what was worse, we
didn’t know what rules we now had to abide by.
When you’re caught in the turbulence of a strategic inflection point, the sad fact is that
instinct and judgment are all you’ve got to guide you through. But the good news is that
even though your judgment got you into this tough position, it can also get you out. It’s just a
question of training your instincts to pick up a different set of signals.
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FORWARD: with Malcolm Netburn February 2013
I learned that the word “point” in a strategic inflection point is something of a misnomer. It’s
not a point; it’s a long, torturous struggle.
Customers drifting away from their former buying habits may provide the most subtle
and insidious cause of a strategic inflection point – subtle and insidious because it takes
place slowly.
2. Helpful Cassandras
In Greek mythology, Cassandra was a truth-speaking prophetess cursed to never be believed by
anyone. At every company, there are those employees who are often passed off as being paranoid
in nature. Grove calls these employees “Helpful Cassandras,” after the mythological seer.
Though they hold varying work titles, their roles typically call them to interface a great deal with
the outside world, causing them to be most immediately aware of up-and-coming shifts.
Chances are, Grove says, you are already surrounded by a few of these Helpful Cassandras.
You don’t even need to seek them out, says Grove, because they will likely come to you bearing
warnings that should be, at the very least, considered. The temptation will be to write them off
in assurance that the sky is not, in fact, falling. However inconvenient, time should be taken to
investigate the cause for your Cassandras’ paranoia.
The Cassandras in your organization are a consistently helpful element in recognizing
strategic inflection points.
Middle managers – especially those who deal with the outside world, like people in sales – are
often the first to realize that what worked before doesn’t quite work anymore; that the rules
are changing. They usually don’t have an easy time explaining it to senior management, so
the senior management in a company is sometimes late to realize that the world is changing
on them – and the leader is often the last of all to know.
Because they are on the front lines of the company, the Cassandras also feel more vulnerable
to danger than do senior managers in their more or less bolstered corporate headquarters.
Bad news has a much more immediate impact on them personally.
Of course, you can’t spend all your time listening to random inputs. But you should be open
to them. As you keep doing it, you will develop a feel for whose views are apt to contain
gems of information and a sense of who will take advantage of your openness to clutter
you with noise.
Sometimes a Cassandra brings not tidings of a disaster but a new way of looking at things.
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FORWARD: with Malcolm Netburn February 2013
3. The Six Forces Affecting Business
Andrew Grove is a known advocate for classical competitive strategy analysis. Grove leans on Harvard
University professor Michael Porter’s identification of forces that affect the competitiveness of a
company. Here, Grove expands Porter’s five points to include his own.
I. Competitors: The power, vigor and competence of a company’s existing competitors: Are
there a lot of them? Are they well funded? Do they clearly focus on your business?
II. Suppliers: The power, vigor and competence of a company’s suppliers: Are there a lot of
them, so that the business has plenty of choices, or are there few of them, so that they have
the business by the throat? Are they aggressive and greedy or are they conservative and
guided by the long view toward their customers?
III. Customers: The power, vigor and competence of a company’s customers: Are there a lot of
them, or is the business dependent on just one or two major customers? Are the customers
very demanding, perhaps because their business operates under cutthroat competition, or is
their business more “gentlemanly”?
IV. Potential Competitors: The power, vigor and competence of a company’s potential
competitors: These players are not in the business today but circumstances could change and
they might decide to come in; if so, they may be bigger, more competent, better funded and
more aggressive than the existing competitors.
V. Substitution: The possibility that your product or service can be built or delivered in a
different way. This is often called “substitution,” and I’ve found that this last factor is
the most deadly of all. New techniques, new approaches, new technologies can upset
the old order, mandate a new set of rules and create an entirely new climate in which
to do business.
VI. Complementors: Recent modifications of competitive theory call attention to a sixth force:
the force of complementors. Complementors are other businesses from whom customers buy
complementary products.
The Six Forces Affecting Business
Power, vigor and
Power, vigor and Power, vigor and
competence of
competence of competence of
complementors
existing competitors customers
THE
THE BUSINESS
BUSINESS
Power, vigor and Possibility that what Power, vigor and
competence of your business is competence of
suppliers doing can be done potential competitors
in a different way
– Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove
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FORWARD: with Malcolm Netburn February 2013
4. The 10X Change
Your company will see numerous significant changes throughout its lifespan. Of course, not all are
significant enough to trigger a real strategic inflection point. Below are Grove’s how-to insights
for determining when a change is just a change and when a change implies something much more
profound – what Grove calls a 10X change.
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. There’s wind and
then there’s a typhoon, there are waves and then there’s a tsunami. There are competitive forces
and then there are supercompetitive forces. I’ll call such a very large change in one of these six
forces a “10X” change, suggesting that the force has become ten times what it was just recently.
Grove advises companies to ask themselves these key questions to determine the level of change it
is facing:
I. Competitors: Is your key competitor about to change?
Grove suggests the silver bullet test for identifying this. If your company had a single bullet
to kill off its worst competitor, what competitor would that be? Under normal circumstances,
identifying this competitor is practically automatic and easy to point out. If you find yourself
debating who the most important competitor to eliminate would be, there’s a good chance
you may be facing significant 10X change.
II. Complementors: Is your key complementor about to change? Does the company that in the
past years mattered the most to you and your business seem less important today?
III. Change in resolve among colleagues: Do people seem to be “losing it” around you?
Does it seem that people who for years had been very competent have suddenly gotten
decoupled from what really matters? … If key aspects of the business shift around you, the
very process of genetic selection that got you and your associates where you are might retard
your ability to recognize the new trends. A sign of this might be that all of a sudden some
people “don’t seem to get it.”
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