The driven life of Intel titan Grove
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Reviewed by Elizabeth Corcoran
Sunday, November 26, 2006
Andy Grove: Life and Times of an American
By Richard S. Tedlow
PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN; 568 Pages; $29.95
Over the past few decades, we've seen a parade of business archetypes: There's been the chief executive as stubborn rebel, as domineering whirlwind, as greedy crook. Now in "Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American," Harvard Business School Professor Richard S. Tedlow takes us backstage to see the human jitters, foibles and strengths of a legendary boss.
Grove deserves a big biography. As much as any other single person, he built Silicon Valley, bringing the computer revolution into all our lives. He led Intel Corp. to supremacy in the microchip business, enabling powerful computers that are cheap enough to be birthday presents for many people.
Tedlow, who had unfettered access to Grove, goes well beyond the career highlights to present a warm and discursive portrait of a complex man. Grove is unfailingly blunt, quick to engage in sharp confrontation, wickedly funny, brilliant, a thoughtful listener, plagued by fear, achingly critical of himself and others and, at times, simply wrong. What come through most steadily: Grove's insatiable hunger to learn -- and his burning desire to be noticed.
Grove's story has the lyrical qualities of a Broadway show. Born Jewish in Hungary in 1936, Grove fled to the United States when the Soviets invaded Budapest in 1956, earned a doctorate in chemical engineering and became a captain of industry. Along the way, he has confronted some formidable health challenges: scarlet fever as a child, prostate cancer in his late 50s and now Parkinson's disease.
On the job, Grove was beset with doubt from Intel's first day. When he joined in 1968, "I was scared to death," Grove later said. "I literally had nightmares. I was supposed to be director of engineering, but there were so few of us that they made me director of operations. My first assignment was to get a post office box so we could get literature describing the equipment we couldn't afford to buy."
Even so, Grove had the ability to step outside his daily tussle and see himself -- often wryly -- at a distance. In 1969, Grove pasted into his notebook a magazine clipping that described the responsibilities of a motion picture director: "a soother of egos, a cajoler of artistic talent ... [with] the vision and force to make all these elements fuse into an inspired whole." Above the clipping, Grove printed: "MY JOB DESCRIPTION?"
His devotion to Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, bordered on filial. When Moore was away from Intel during his time as chief executive, Grove wrote memos to fill in what Moore had missed. In June 1975, Grove wrote: "Welcome home! You absolutely, literally, positively could not have chosen a better/(worse) week (depending on point of view) to be gone."
Grove was much more terse with Intel's co-founder, Robert Noyce, a charismatic leader and gifted scientist who was uninterested in daily management, according to several accounts. "I view the ... situation as Intel's biggest management blunder, with you being the principal," Grove wrote to Noyce in 1971. "I think you should also have to face [your mistakes] like the rest of us have to otherwise you will keep going on making them!"
Such raw comments -- what Grove liked to call "constructive confrontation" -- became a trademark. Yet Grove routinely gave himself a sharp tongue-lashing, too. In November 1976, Grove wrote: "[D]issatisfied w/overall co. performance (hence: me!) ... frequently depressed; thoughts of bailing out."
"Reinvention" has been so overused that it now has the resonance of a sitcom theme song. But Tedlow describes how Grove saw himself as a student at many junctures of his career and refreshed his skills with the same tenacity Intel applied to designing each new generation of computer chips.
Grove held his standards high, sometimes achingly so. Colleague Sean Maloney recalled devoting more than a month to a piece of analysis only to have Grove return it, saying, "I'm bitterly disappointed."
For some, such critiques cut to the bone; others, including Maloney (who is now among Intel's top executives), took it as a goad to excellence. "He would get the best of every individual," Maloney told Tedlow. "He may piss them off, which he frequently did, but he got the best out of [them]."
Tedlow's book veers closer to an appreciation of Grove than to a hard-hitting critique. He concedes as much in his acknowledgements, noting, "the reader should be aware that Andy Grove is a magnetic man. It is impossible, at least for me, to have spent as much time with him as I did and to have immersed myself as completely as I have in this project without developing feelings of admiration and affection that must have colored this account to some degree."
More insight into Grove's jousts with Microsoft founder Bill Gates would have been welcome. Tedlow devotes the bulk of one chapter to the topic but didn't interview Gates. That's a pity.
So many successful people become consumed by vanity or arrogance. Grove certainly wanted to be recognized for his accomplishments. Yet no matter how many times he reinvented himself, he never quite shook the traces of the boy who once hid from the Nazis. His lifelong belief that disaster lurks just around the corner became his constant goad, his strength, his humanity -- and makes for a story well worth telling.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/11/26/RVGSUME5VL1.DTL&hw=Elizabeth+Corcoran&sn=001&sc=1000
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