• Develop Your Corporate Memory

  • Another key is ensuring that a company retains, and can quickly retrieve, the information that it accumulates. Gates calls this "corporate memory." And it isn’t only employees who need access to vital information; customers, too, should have access to this information. This way, account managers and customers can refer to the same document when discussing [...]

  • Empower Workers with Information They Can Act On

  • Gates leads by example, inviting anyone in the organization to send him an email at any time. And he doesn’t want just the good news—he wants bad news even faster (another Gates principle is, "Bad news must travel fast"). In today’s fast-changing business environment, anyone, anywhere, can get a paradigm-busting idea, and organizations that do [...]

  • Foster a Culture in Which Ideas Rule

  • While Microsoft clearly was not oblivious to the Internet in the early to mid-1990s, it did not put the Internet high on its priority list. (Gates recalls that he ranked the Internet as number five or six on his priority list back then.) What is most compelling about Microsoft’s shift to an Internet strategy is [...]

  • The Rise of the Internet and the End of Microsoft?

  • The story of how Microsoft reacted to the Internet phenomenon illustrates the way Gates empowers workers by encouraging communication at every level of the hierarchy—and thereby derives great benefit. Had Gates taken a different tack, Microsoft might have become a very different company. The story begins in the mid-1990s. While some companies were gearing up [...]

  • Rethink the Way Information Moves Inside the Company

  • Gates has been one of the main drivers of the technology revolution. Nevertheless, he has made some fundamental miscalculations about that revolution. For example, at first Gates was not a believer in the Internet, although he later came to view it as a powerful tool that would transform the very nature of work and commerce. [...]

  • What Would Bill Gates Do?

  • Smart people anywhere in the company should have the power to drive an initiative. —BILL GATES, Chairman and chief software architect, Microsoft The Internet is not just about new start-up companies …. The Internet is much more about existing businesses and how they take skills and customer base and move over to use these digital [...]

  • Let Chaos Reign: Experiment Early-And Often

  • Once you have identified a strategic inflection point, the key to dealing with it effectively is to "let chaos reign," says Grove. It is important for organizations to experiment in multiple directions so that they have the power to respond to a strategic inflection point. To put it in more dire terms, if you’re not [...]

  • Preparing Your Organization for a Strategic Inflection Point

  • Obviously, the advent of a strategic inflection point is not under one’s control. So what sort of actions does Grove recommend in order to ready the organization for such a massive change? First, says Grove, the CEO has to adopt and promote a "guardian" attitude: The prime responsibility of a manager is to guard constantly [...]

  • Dealing with a Strategic Inflection Point: A Manager’s Primer

  • According to Grove, there are three warning signs that companies must heed in order to recognize a possible 10x force. Monitoring these signs may be an organization’s best weapon against the sneak attack of a strategic inflection point. YOUR KEY COMPETITOR IS ABOUT TO CHANGE. The organization that you have long viewed as your primary [...]

  • Strategic Inflections Points Can Strengthen Organizations

  • Not all strategic inflection points spell disaster for an organization and its managers. Says Grove: Strategic inflection points offer promises as well as threats. It is at such times of fundamental change that the cliché "adapt or die" takes on its true meaning. How can this be? Because companies that adapt in response to profound [...]

  • Strategic Inflection Points Defined: A 10X Change

  • When Andy Grove arrived at his office one December morning in 1994, he had no idea that his world was about to be turned upside down once again. Intel was then in the midst of launching its latest-generation microprocessor, the Pentium processor. Some weeks earlier, a "minor design error" had been discovered in the chip, [...]

  • The First Crisis: Intel Gets Beaten at its Own Game

  • In the early 1980s, Intel’s three-legged stool almost came crashing down. When the company first started, it had nearly a 100 percent share of the memory market. New competitors appeared in the 1970s, but it was not until the 1980s that the Japanese broke Intel’s rock-solid hold on this market. They did so by producing [...]

  • The Dual Levers of Success: Execution and Strategy

  • It all started in 1968, when Grove teamed up with two other people who shared his vision for a new business. Andy Grove, Bob Noyce, and Gordon Moore thought they could own the world. They had discovered that they could store ever-increasing numbers of transistors on a single chip without noticeably increasing the costs. More [...]

  • What Would Andy Grove Do?

  • Most companies don’t die because they are wrong; most die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greater danger is in standing still. —ANDY GROVE, cofounder and former CEO, Intel I submit that all businesses, whether they are bricks origin or [...]

  • Invest in R&D: the Solutions Perspective

  • Shortly after Gerstner arrived at IBM, he demonstrated his willingness to invest in the company’s future, in the form of research and development, despite the company’s mind-numbing losses. On the table was his predecessor’s plan to dissolve IBM’s research and development department. Again, Gerstner went in the opposite direction. He decided to keep the Watson [...]

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