Top 40 Andrew S. Grove Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.”

— Andrew S. Grove

2. “Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.”

— Andrew S. Grove

3. “Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or “flattened” the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.”

— Andrew S. Grove

4. “The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which 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.”

— Andrew S. Grove

5. “The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.”

— Andrew S. Grove

6. “The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.”

— Andrew S. Grove

7. “My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.”

— Andrew S. Grove

8. “Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”

— Andrew S. Grove

9. “At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off. But what is really being influenced here? It is the next year – and only the next year.”

— Andrew S. Grove

10. “When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.”

— Andrew S. Grove

11. “Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful.”

— Andrew S. Grove

12. “But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this.”

— Andrew S. Grove

13. “Admitting that you need to learn something new is always difficult. It is even harder if you are a senior manager who is accustomed to the automatic deference which people accord you owing to your position. But if you don’t fight it, that very deference may become a wall that isolates you from learning new things. It all takes self-discipline.”

— Andrew S. Grove

14. “In Technology, whatever can be done will be done.”

— Andrew S. Grove

15. “The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.”

— Andrew S. Grove

16. “The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.”

— Andrew S. Grove

17. “The key to survival is to learn to add more value – and.”

— Andrew S. Grove

18. “You cannot stay in the self-actualized mode if you’re always worried about failure.”

— Andrew S. Grove

19. “Don’t differentiate without a difference.”

— Andrew S. Grove

20. “The ability to recognize that the winds have shifted and to take appropriate action before you wreck your boat in crucial to the future of an enterprise.”

— Andrew S. Grove

21. “Altogether too often, people substitute opinions for facts and emotions for analysis.”

— Andrew S. Grove

22. “Adapt or die. Some.”

— Andrew S. Grove

23. “We must recognize that no amount of formal planning can anticipate changes such as globalization and the information revolution we’ve referred to above. Does that mean that you shouldn’t plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”

— Andrew S. Grove

24. “Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.”

— Andrew S. Grove

25. “You can be the subject of a strategic inflection point but you can also be the cause of one.”

— Andrew S. Grove

26. “On the other hand, when there’s a fundamental change in the industry and you don’t change your skills, you will lose at both winning companies and losing companies. That is a situation that can truly be classified as a career inflection point.”

— Andrew S. Grove

27. “To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.”

— Andrew S. Grove

28. “Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace – and you out of that workplace?”

— Andrew S. Grove

29. “So in the end careful interviewing doesn’t guarantee you anything, it merely increases your odds of getting lucky.”

— Andrew S. Grove

30. “It’s harder to be the best of class in several fields than in just one.”

— Andrew S. Grove

31. “Electronic banking is still a clumsy way to replace a stamp. And interactive television seems to have vanished even before the ink dried on the mega-announcements.”

— Andrew S. Grove

32. “We live in an age in which the pace of technological change is pulsating ever faster, causing waves that spread outward toward all industries. This increased rate of change will have an impact on you, no matter what you do for a living.”

— Andrew S. Grove

33. “There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.”

— Andrew S. Grove

34. “Few of the top ten participants in the new horizontal computer industry rose from the ranks of the old vertical computer industry, bearing testimony to the observation that it is truly difficult for a successful industry participant to adapt to a completely different industry structure.”

— Andrew S. Grove

35. “This device became a big hit. Our new challenge became how to satisfy demand for it. To put this in perspective, we were a company composed of a handful of people with a new type of design and a fragile technology, housed in a little rented building, and we were trying to supply the seemingly insatiable appetite of large computer companies for memory chips. The.”

— Andrew S. Grove

36. “The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.”

— Andrew S. Grove

37. “Remember that by saying “yes” – to projects, a course of action, or whatever – you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.”

— Andrew S. Grove

38. “All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.”

— Andrew S. Grove

39. “If existing management want to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, they must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity. They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past. That’s what Gordon and I had to do when we figuratively went out the door, stomped out our cigarettes and returned to do the job.”

— Andrew S. Grove

40. “When the need to stretch is not spontaneous, management needs to create an environment to foster it.”

— Andrew S. Grove

41. “A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.”

— Andrew S. Grove

42. “Once someone’s source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.”

— Andrew S. Grove