Grove, who built Intel into top chip company, dies
Print Edition
ANDY Grove, the former Intel Corp chief executive whose youth under Nazi occupation and escape from the Iron Curtain inspired an “only the paranoid survive” management philosophy that saved the chip maker from financial ruin in the 1980s, has died. He was 79.
Intel said Grove died on Monday. It did not specify a cause of death.
Grove, who was instrumental in building Intel into the world’s largest chip company during his 37-year career there, had suffered from Parkinson’s disease. He also suffered from prostate cancer in the mid-1990s.
He was a mercurial but visionary leader who helped position Intel’s microprocessors as the central technology inside personal computers.
Grove’s bet-the-company gamble — moving Intel from memory chips to microprocessors in the mid-1980s to serve what was still a fledgling PC industry — helped rescue Intel from a financial crisis and set it on course to becoming one of the most profitable and important technology companies of all time.
“Andy made the impossible happen, time and again, and inspired generations of technologists, entrepreneurs, and business leaders,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said.
Robert Burgelman, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business who started teaching management classes with Grove in the late 1980s, called Grove “one of the most incisive thinkers that I have ever come across.” He said Grove’s technical and strategic abilities were critical in building Intel and fending off threats from Asian competitors.
“I don’t think Intel would have been Intel as we know it, and therefore the US chip industry would not have been what it is” without Grove, Burgelman said.
Intel created the world’s first commercial microprocessor in 1971, but the company’s primary focus was memory chips for mainframe computers. That was until the personal computer was invented and a new use for Intel’s microprocessors emerged.
Grove’s leadership of that transition affirmed his status as a key figure in the digital revolution and an icon of business leadership, whose maneuvers have been studied and dissected in management classes around the world.
Yet Grove, known at times as combative and vindictive to those who crossed him, was also pilloried for his role in one of the biggest missteps in Intel’s history: the company’s intransigence after a major calculating flaw was discovered in 1994 in Intel’s flagship Pentium microprocessor, an error that Intel had known about but deemed too insignificant to fix.
Grove’s response to the outcry was to require customers who wanted to return flawed chips to call Intel and convince the company they needed a replacement. He later capitulated and set aside nearly a half-billion dollars for a no-questions-asked exchange program. His mentality helped shape a strict, often caustic management style that is now as much a part of Silicon Valley lore as Grove’s relentless focus on sharpening Intel’s technological advantages.
Grove wrote several well-received books, including “Only the Paranoid Survive,” a 1996 treatise on the science of managing crises, and his 2001 autobiography, “Swimming Across,” a harrowing memoir of Grove’s childhood. Grove also dabbled as an advice columnist, penning a series of newspaper columns on workplace dilemmas that earned him the nickname “Dear Abby of the Workplace.”
A Hungarian refugee born Andras Istvan Grof who fled to America by boat in 1957 and Westernized his name, Grove’s life was characterized by survival against all odds.
He got past scarlet fever at age 4, though it permanently damaged his hearing. A Jew growing up in Nazi-occupied Hungary, he survived the Holocaust by moving frequently as a child, boarding with family friends and taking on an assumed name. He made his escape in a daring run for the Austrian border. Grove immigrated to the US at age 20, a penniless refugee who would go on to amass a personal fortune believed to be worth about US$400 million, according to Forbes magazine.
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