• You will hear part of a conversation between an interviewer and Andrew Grove, the chairman, CEO and co-founder of Intel. • For

F: Our guru on management is a 63 years old Hungarian immigrate who arrived in the U. S. in 1956 with neither a word of English, nor a dime in his pocket. Today he runs the company that makes the semiconductor chips that power 90% of the world’s personal computers. He is Andrew Grove, chairman, CEO and cofounder of Intel, the San Jose based giant in semiconductor chip manufacturing. Obviously, Intel has managed change dramatically well. That’s what Intel is about. Yet change really intimidates people and it’s very frightening. What do you think people can do, managers, just regular folks, can do to alleviate some of the scariness of change?
M: I’m not sure you want to eliminate scariness. I really wonder if the tight-rope-walkers can do their job because they are not afraid of heights or whether they can do their jobs because they are afraid of heights and they’ve just learned how to do their task that much better because they know what it’s like, or they have a pretty good idea what it’s like to fall. I think fear is your "ally in here, because it is fear that gets you out of comfortable equilibrium, gets you to do difficult tasks". You know, managing in general is not an easy job, so I don’t think I wanna eliminate fear. I don’t eliminate fear of change, I don’t wanna eliminate fear of what’s wanna happen if you don’t move. It’s healthy, it’s kind of like, you know, pain is healthy, physical pain, it warns your body that something is wrong and just extinguishing pain doesn’t make the problem going away. It just makes your sense that there is a problem going away. So it makes it worse.
F: One of the biggest contributions that you’ve made down to making the public aware of what’s inside a computer is the Intel Inside campaign, which is a very big marketing campaign designed to make the consumer, the end user, allow them to make their choice based on Intel being inside the box. When did you first think that this was important? There are obviously risks to this strategy, there are obviously rewards. How did you analyse the risk-reward in this?
M: Well, you know, it was kind of obvious in a way, if you listened to the language people used to describe their computer at the time—you’re talking late 80s.  Most of the time, people would refer to their computer by the number, the number of the microprocessor that they had in it. I’m gonna take my trusty old 386 and look it up, or do something on it. They didn’t use the name of the manufacturer. They used the model number of the microprocessor, which actually is kind of right, because the fundamental characteristic of that computer is the microprocessor. That defines what software it’s gonna run, it’s gonna define how fast it runs it, and if it defines how fast it runs it, it defines what you can do with it. So the user experience, what the user can do and how well he can do it, more than anything else depends on the microprocessor, the chip. So we kind of sensed that we really had that identity but we didn’t know exactly how to go about it. We wanted to market the product name, but the problem with the product name was we couldn’t copyright it, I mean, couldn’t trademark the numbers. We had a legal battle on it and we lost. So how do you tell our story, given that the microprocessor gives the characteristic of their computer to, not completely, but more than anything else, to the user. And we started merchandising Intel, the Computer Inside. Not on the devices but in our own commercials. And that kind of worked, we had good results, good focus group results, people understood, yeah, the Intel stuff is the computer
F: So how much now do you think of your success is marketing, and how much of it is technology?
M: Andrew Grove: You know, for a long time I’ve thought about this and had to answer the questions internally a lot. And the best I can say is describing Intel as a three legged stool, and the three legs are design, technology and manufacturing, and marketing and sales. And if one of those legs is shorter than the other, the stool is gonna tip over