Best known as the CEO of Intel, Andy Grove was a Holocaust survivor who went through hell:
“By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. . . [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned.”
Unsurprisingly his motto was “only the paranoid survive,” he wrote a book by the same name and his management style reflected this ethos.
As a survivor of brutal anti-Semitism as well as the fiercely competitive high-tech market, Grove knew that innovation could not survive a corporate culture of playing pattycake, brownnosing, or other dysfunctional games.
Rather, success is the result of leveraging productive conflict between people with different ideas.
Today we have lost a great leader.
It would be a shame if the lessons he learned through such difficult trials died with him.
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All opinions my own. Photo via Wikipedia. Links:
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