Andrew Grove

"Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers."

"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."

"You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die."

"You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double the efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto Im advocating is — Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos. Does that mean that you shouldnt plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events."

"A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done."

"Each company, ruggedly individualistic, does its best to expand efficiently and improve its own profitability. However, our pursuit of our individual businesses, which often involves transferring manufacturing and a great deal of engineering out of the country, has hindered our ability to bring innovations to scale at home. Without scaling, we dont just lose jobs—we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate."

"By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. . . [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them."

"And try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing."

"All of us in business have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted."

"Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldnt let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers."

"When I came to Intel, I was scared to death. I left a very secure job where I knew what I was doing and started running R&D for a brand new venture in untried territory. It was terrifying."

"Technology happens, its not good, its not bad. Is steel good or bad?"