As a historian, most of HBS professor Richard Tedlow's subjects are no longer breathing. One great exception is Andy Grove, Intel's former CEO, whom Tedlow profiles in a book due next fall, The Life and Times of Andy Grove. You can get a taste of what is to come on Fortune.com, where Tedlow has contributed an essay on Grove's growth as a manager and leader.
Tedlow calls Grove “America's greatest student and teacher of business,” and this essay describes several key decisions that reveal Grove's brilliance at grasping profound changes in the business environment and steering the company's big bow into new waters. By the 1970s, for example, the company had made its fortune in computer memory chips. IBM was not only its largest customer; it was its largest shareholder, too. But as memory became a commodity in the 1980s, Grove decided to follow a bet-the-company strategy to charge into microprocessors even while risking the loss of IBM's business. The move, of course, not only paid off for Intel but also helped launch the PC revolution.
This essay is also instructive by showing Grove a hair's breadth away from making a catastrophic blunder—the temptation to abandon the traditional CISC chip architecture for the trendier and faster RISC technology. Grove emerged as an exemplary leader because he allowed two executives to talk him out of the decision. Observes Tedlow: “Grove's MO as a leader has always been to depend on 'helpful Cassandras' to make sure that he doesn't win an argument he ought to lose.”
Studying Grove, says Tedlow, will help today's managers cope with the accelerating rate of change. “Grove is the best model we've got for doing business in the twenty-first century,” Tedlow writes. “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.”