Starting Intel After completing his Ph.D. in 1963, Grove worked at
Fairchild Semiconductor as a researcher, and by 1967 had become its assistant director of development. His work there made him familiar with the early development of
integrated circuits, which would lead to the "
microcomputer revolution" in the 1970s. In 1967, he wrote a college textbook on the subject,
Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices. and
Gordon Moore (1978) In 1968,
Robert Noyce and
Gordon Moore co-founded Intel, after they and Grove left
Fairchild Semiconductor. Grove joined on the day of its incorporation, although he was not a founder. Fellow Hungarian émigré
Leslie L. Vadász was Intel's fourth employee. Grove worked initially as the company's director of engineering, and helped get its early manufacturing operations started. In 1983, he wrote a book,
High Output Management, in which he described many of his methods and manufacturing concepts. As a result, he chose to discontinue producing
DRAMs and focus instead on manufacturing microprocessors. Grove, along with Intel's sales manager to IBM, Earl Whetstone, played a key role in negotiating with IBM to use only Intel microprocessors in all of their new personal computers. The company's revenue increased from $2,672 in its first year (1968) to $20.8 billion in 1997. Grove was appointed Intel's president in 1979,
CEO in 1987, and then chairman of the board in 1997. In May 1998 Grove relinquished the post of CEO to
Craig Barrett, as Grove had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years earlier, though he remained chairman until November 2004. Since then Grove remained at Intel as a senior advisor, and has also been a lecturer at
Stanford University. He reflected back upon Intel's growth through the years: Grove is credited with having transformed Intel from a manufacturer of memory chips into the world's dominant producer of microprocessors for PC, servers, and general-purpose computing. During his tenure as CEO, Grove oversaw a 4,500% increase in Intel's market capitalization from $4 billion to $197 billion, making it the world's 7th largest company, with 64,000 employees. Most of the company's profits were reinvested in research and development, along with building new facilities, in order to produce improved and faster microprocessors.)
Management methods and style As director of operations, manufacturing became Grove's primary focus and his management style relied heavily on his management concepts. As the company expanded and he was appointed chairman, Grove became more involved in strategic decision-making, including establishing markets for new products, coordinating manufacturing processes and developing new partnerships with smaller companies. Grove helped create the
Intel Architecture Laboratory (IAL) in
Oregon to ensure that software was developed in time to take advantage of their new microprocessors. Grove stated that "you are making decisions about what the information technology world will want five years into the future." Biographer Jeremy Byman observed that Grove "was the one person at Intel who refused to let the company rest on its laurels." Grove explains his reasoning: A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation. Strategic inflection points cause a mismatch between a company's current strategies and changes in the industry, something Grove called strategic dissonance. Grove believed that the role of
Helpful Cassandras, individuals who raise red flags about potential problems and challenge the dominant view, are crucial in identifying and mitigating risks before they become bigger issues. He emphasized the importance of organizations listening to the warnings of Cassandras and taking action, instead of ignoring or suppressing them, in order to identify and successfully address strategic inflection points.
Competitive mindset Grove had a strong competitive mindset, viewing competition as the key driver of innovation and progress. He encouraged companies to aim for industry leadership and constantly seek ways to improve their offerings, processes and operations. He likened himself to a coach and viewed the manager's role as one of fueling employee motivation to excel. He believed "good fear" could play a productive role. "The quality guru
W. Edwards Deming advocated stamping out fear in corporations. I have trouble with the simplemindedness of this dictum. The most important role of managers is to create an environment where people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace. Fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion. Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators."
Constructive confrontation Grove fostered a culture of open communication where employees were encouraged to speak their minds in a "constructive confrontation" approach.
Egalitarian ethos Grove asserted that knowledge power surpasses positional power. He ingrained that philosophy in the workplace culture at Intel. "We argue about issues, not the people who advocate them." As a testament to this ethos, there were no executive perks at Intel, including special dining rooms, washrooms, or parking spots. Grove's office was a standard cubicle, reflecting his personal preference for an egalitarian atmosphere. Grove disliked "mahogany-paneled corner offices." "I've been living in cubicles since 1978—and it hasn't hurt a whole lot." An acronym for objectives and key results, it became central to Google's culture as a "management methodology that helps to ensure that the company focuses efforts on the same important issues throughout the organization." The objective is the clearly defined goal, while the key results were the specific benchmarks to ensure achievement of that goal were "measurable and verifiable."
Larry Page, co-founder of
Google, credited OKRs in the foreword to Doerr's book: "OKRs have helped lead us to 10x growth, many times over. They've helped make our crazily bold mission of 'organizing the world's information' perhaps even achievable. They've kept me and the rest of the company on time and on track when it mattered the most."
Preference for a "job-centric" American economy While Grove supported helping technology startups, he also felt that America was wrong in thinking that those new companies would increase employment. "Startups are a wonderful thing," he wrote in a 2010 article for
Bloomberg, "but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment." Although many of those startups and entrepreneurs would achieve tremendous success and wealth, said Grove, he was more concerned with the overall negative effect on America: "What kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work and masses of unemployed?" He explained the causes and effects of many business's growth plans: To remedy the problem, he strongly believed that "job creation" should become America's primary objective, much as it is in Asian nations. Among the methods he felt were worth considering was the imposition of a tax on imported products, with the funds received then made available to help American companies scale their operations in the US. However, he also accepted the fact that his ideas would be controversial: "If what I'm suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it." At the same hearing, he also expressed his opinion about
internet privacy, stating that "personal data is a form of property and it's inevitable that governments will regulate property rights." He said that it would be better if the federal government established its own uniform privacy standards rather than have states create a patchwork of different laws. He also taught graduate computer physics courses at the
University of California, Berkeley and the
Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Philanthropy In 2005, Grove made the largest donation that the
City College of New York (
CUNY) has ever received. His grant of $26 million transformed the CCNY School of Engineering into the
Grove School of Engineering. Grove was also instrumental, as a key fundraiser, in establishing the
University of California, San Francisco's
Mission Bay Campus, the largest ongoing biomedical construction project in the world. Chancellor Sam Hawgood said that Grove's "generous and tireless support of UCSF has transformed our university and helped accelerate our research into breakthrough treatments and better patient care." In an interview in
Esquire magazine in 2000, Grove encouraged the United States to be "vigilant as a nation to have tolerance for difference, a tolerance for new people." He pointed out that immigration and immigrants are what made America what it is. ==Honors and awards==