Organizational Power != Knowledge Power, Highlights of Andy Grove's classic, "Only the Paranoid Survive"

"Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive." — Andy Grove

Finally got around to reading Andy Grove’s, Only The Paranoid Survive. Along the way I found lessons that almost 20 years later, rang eerily true. Here are a few of my favorite parts.. recommend reading yourself!

1. Being human is our greatest asset, and greatest handicap: Blinded by procrastination, emotional decision making, and past success, many executives are often the last to know that the ground is shifting under their feet.
2. Decisiveness > Certainty: The danger of being wrong is real, but inability to move quickly and decisively will almost always kill you first.

Being human is our greatest asset, and greatest handicap

Procrastination
“When companies are facing major changes in their core business, they seem to plunge into what seem to be totally unrelated acquisitions and mergers. In my view, a lot of these activities are motivated by the need of senior management to occupy themselves respectably with something that clearly and legitimately requires their attention day in and day out, something they can justify spending their time on and make progress instead of figuring out how to cope with an impending strategically destructive force”

Emotional decision making
“The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get someone who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways”

“People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner…If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adapt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity”

“If we got kicked out and board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do. Gordon [Gordon Moore, Chairman of Intel] answered without hesitation ‘He would get us out of memories.’ I stared at him, numb, then said, ‘Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves’”

Hubris brought by past success and seniority
“Work very hard to break down the walls between those who possess knowledge power and those who possess organizational power”

“When Spring comes, snow melts first at the periphery, because that’s where it’s the most exposed.”

Decisiveness > certainty

“If you’re wrong, you will die. But most companies don’t die because they are wrong; most die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is standing still.”

“It is best when senior management recognizes and accepts the inevitability of a strategic inflection point early on and acts before the vitality of the business has been sapped by the “10x” forces affecting it”

“Hedging is expensive and dilutes commitment. Without exquisite focus, the resources and energy of the organization with be spread a mile wide and they will be an inch deep”

Irrationality of emergent trends
“When dealing with emerging trends you may very well have to go against rational exploration”

“You have to be able to argue with the data when your experience and judgement suggest the emergence of a force that may be too small to show up in the analysis but has the potential to grow so big as to change the rules your business operates by”

Appendix
“Don’t introduce improvements whose only purpose is to give you an advantage over your competitor without giving your customer a substantial advantage”