Andy Grove: Engage and then plan
It's a performance as remarkable as his life story. There will not be another CEO who survived both the Nazis and the communists before becoming a naturalized capitalist. And yet Grove is the best model we've got for doing business in the 21st century. If you hope to thrive in an environment of rapid change, it is this outlier—his strengths forged in a distant and vanished world—that you should follow. Begin your lesson in leadership the same way Andy Grove attacks a problem: by setting aside everything you know.
Tedlow covers well known territory and recounts a recent meeting Grove, who helped start Intel in 1968 and served as CEO from 1987 to 1998, had with Intel employees about the company's new health care initiative. He advised those employees to be "quick and dirty" and to "engage and then plan." He doesn't mean they should play dirty--they need dig deep and "get it better." His advice isn't what you would expect from a big company CEO, but Grove has never been a conventional manager as Tedlow outlines. Grove's 1996 book, "Only the Paranoid Survive : How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company," should be required reading for anyone, including the young Web 2.0 hotshots, hoping to have longevity in business. With the Itanium's ongoing problems, AMD's recent x64 rise and Sun's new UltraSparc T1, Intel executives are probably dusting off their copies again...