Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

“The person who is the star of previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.”

“if you're wrong, you will die. But most companies don't die because they are wrong; most die because they don't commit themselves. They fritter away their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in Standing still”

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

“How can you motivate yourself to continue to follow a leader when he appears to be going around in circles?”

“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.”

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

“People in the trenches are usually in touch with impending changes early”

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more Successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing”

“People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner.”

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

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

“In short, strategic inflection points are about fundamental change in any business, technological or not”

“As we throw ourselves into raw actions, our senses and instincts will rapidly be honed again”

“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”

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

“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.”

“Accept that no matter where you go to work, you are not an employee - you are a business with one employee, you. Andy Grove, CEO, Intel”

“The strategic inflection point is the time to wake up an listen”

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

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction.”

“a strategic inflection point is a time in the life of business when its fundamentals are about to change. that change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end”

“Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”

“While the story is unique to Intel, the lessons, I believe, are universal”

“we confused the manager’s general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.”

“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?”

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

“The implication was that either the people in the room needed to change their areas of knowledge and expertise or people themselves needed to be changed”

“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.”

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

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

“Peter Drucker quotes a definition of an entrepreneur as someone who moves resources from areas of lower productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.”

“[..] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”

“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.”

“if you base your business on the volume leader, you will be going after a larger business yourself”

“The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and”

“Except for one last thing. What if the people who believe in the cheap Internet appliance turn out to be right?”

“A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Adapt or die. Some”

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

“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.”

“The replacement of corporate heads is far more motivated by the need to bring in someone who is not invested in the past than to get somebody who is a better manager or a better leader in other ways.”

“In fact , we might as well say "proprietary", which ,in fact, was the byword of the old computer industry.”

“Don't differentiate without a difference.”

“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.”

“delegation without follow-through is abdication.”