Case Number 39 Andy Grove of Intel: Entrepreneur Turned Executive Andy Grove, one of the three founders of Intel Corporation, was asked three questions by Peter F. Drucker in a 1986 interview. The three questions appear below along with Dr. Grove’s responses. QUESTION 1 If there were one thing to tell a young man or woman who starts out with their own new business and wants to build it, what is the one absolutely essential thing you would tell them? If I had one shot at getting something into a person’s mind or heart in this situation, it would be the concept of submerging their own self and putting it behind the interests of the enterprise. They should not put themselves ahead of the enterprise. And I can’t say that emphatically enough. Whatever problems I have seen all come from people wanting to succeed personally, wanting to be right personally, wanting to win an argument personally, wanting an organization change to propel them ahead personally, without considering what impact that desire or that change has on the organization. Particularly when you are in the small boat with a number of other people—close proximity and pressures are high and tension is high. Getting into the people’s mind that you won’t get there any faster by positioning yourself at the bow of the boat; you’ll only get there faster if you row faster and move the boat forward. If you can get this into the founding people’s hearts and minds, you have won automatically the majority of the battles that will come up. The only thing that matters is the enterprise. You cannot succeed if the enterprise does not succeed. And if the enterprise succeeds, there will be enough success to go around and you’ll get your share. So, my admonishment to any person in that situation is, Don’t put your ego ahead of the enterprise, because you will lose. What is right matters, not who is right. QUESTION 2 What did you have to learn to do and what did you have to learn not to do at the beginning, when the three of you sat down and began to build the company and the business? And then how did this change once the company was successful and very large? The job [initially] was very simple conceptually. You needed to do a certain number of things today, a certain number of things tomorrow, and a certain number of things by the end of the month. And unlike in a company like Intel today, where we are very preoccupied with the process of how to do things, we knew what to do and somebody went and did it. This lack of interest in the process of how you are doing things started to give way to more thought to the [formal] process maybe about three years into the life of the company. For the first three years, there was no game plan; people just did things that they were naturally attracted to, and very rarely did they collide. We only hired people with very specific skills; there was no training involved. We were concerned with people right from the very beginning of the company. The nature of the con ...