Healthy Paranoia for Business.

• Author: HOLTZMAN, HENRY
• Position: Review

Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Company Andrew S. Grove Doubleday Random House Co. New York, NY, 1999 (Updated from 1997 edition) 224 pages, $15.95

Legendary baseball pitcher Satchel Paige once commented, "Don't look behind you, somethin' may be gainin'." Had author Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel Corp., voiced this proverb it would have been: "Always look over your shoulder because something is always gaining."

The premise of Grove's book is that being a certified paranoid individual doesn't mean that someone isn't out to get you. Grove believes the "someone" or "something" is often inside your own organization. No, not corporate spies, but critical decision points where technology is a key factor. Grove calls them strategic inflection points.

Actually, as Grove admits, these are not so much points in time as "tortuous paths to ultimate decisions." These points are often caused by simultaneous growth of internal business needs and increasing competitive pressures. The way to spot these twin events in advance is to keep looking over your shoulder at what you're doing and comparing it to the competition. The author notes that even monopolies have competitors.

Grove cites what he believes to be the defining strategic inflection point in Intel's history. In mid-1985 the Japanese chip manufacturers had begun producing a broad range of "memory products" that were high quality and low cost Few members of the Intel management team realized they could easily become a quickly forgotten footnote of cybernetic history. The author recalls the moment:

"I turned to Gordon Moore (Intel's chairman and CEO at the time). Our mood was downbeat and I asked, 'If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?'

"Gordon 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?"'

Grove's point is that his firm abandoned the full product line approach to become a company focused on microprocessors. He claims that had he been paying more attention to his salespeople and financial analysts, he would have understood earlier and reacted more quickly to the threat. He implies that, initially, it is less important to hear specific solutions to the problem they raised than it was to understand the issues being raised.

As a matter of fact, the ideas offered by the Intel sales...