Does "Knowledge" Trump "Position" At Your Firm?

Now that I've just written a piece celebrating "quiet" leaders, let's talk about Andy Grove.

To be sure, he's about as far from "quiet" as you can get, at least on the surface.  But according to a new biography, Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American , which will debut next week, written by Professor Richard Tedlow of Harvard Business School, Grove learned management as an autodidact, having no alternative.  He was employee #3 at Intel (Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore, each independently wealthy by then, were ##1 & 2—and they were engineers dismissive of management).  If Intel were to be managed at all, it fell to Grove.

Harvard Business Review's Working Knowledge has a pre-publication interview with Tedlow outlining Grove's approach to management, and the Grove combination of severe discipline and wide-eyed amazement makes for a compelling tale. 

Tedlow, for a business biographer, give perhaps unusual weight to Grove's early upbringing in Cold War Hungary (he escaped to the US during the 1956 uprising).   Here's the top-line story:

"Until 1945, anti-Semitism placed Grove's physical survival at risk. His father's mother was killed in Auschwitz, and other members of his (and his wife's) extended family lost their lives in the Holocaust and because of the fighting in World War II. In 1944 and especially early in 1945, young Andy was a hunted child.

"Life under the Communist regime which followed the Soviet defeat of the Germans Grove came to find hateful. Everything about Communist Hungary elevated the lie at the expense of the truth.

"Both during the Nazi and Communist eras, knowing what really was going on—finding out the actual truth—was more than once a matter of life and death for the Grove family."

This, Tedlow maintains, seeded Grove's later relentless insistence on finding the truth in the business world.  Understandably, Grove rebelled against the faux displays of mandatory "patriotism" required at public events, at the pre-ordained, clockwork triumph of every successive five-year plan, at the relentless celebration of the all-knowing State. If you've ever worked at a firm where groupthink dominated, or where management's self-serving pronouncements received unskeptical celebration, you've seen the private-sector equivalent, and Grove rightly insisted that way lay institutional death.

Grove expressed this famously as "knowledge power" trumps "position power," or, differently stated, it's what you know, not what organizational title you have, that matters: "We argue about issues, not who's advocating what."

Among other consequences, this fed Grove's famous ability to stand "outside" whatever challenging situation he was facing and being asked to decide, and look at issues dispassionately and clinically.  Indeed, the most famous single Grove anecdote of all may be the story of how in the late 1970's Intel, then a maker of "D-RAM"  memory chips was being assaulted relentlessly by Japanese and Korean competitors undercutting their prices and grabbing market share.  The end seemed in sight.  In the famous meeting, Grove posited to Intel leadership that if they didn't find a way to surmount the challenge, the Board would fire them.  So he undertook a brilliantly simple thought experiment:  Imagine the Board has fired us; let's walk out of the room and walk back in as the new guys they've now hired.  What would the new guys do?

The answer?  Ditch the D-RAM business and go into microprocessors.

You may have heard that legendary story, but here's one I bet you haven't heard (I surely had not):  Grove evidently kept detailed journals and notebooks, which Tedlow had access to, and this is what he concluded:   

"I mentioned previously that Grove is an autodidact—a man capable of teaching himself a remarkable variety of new skills. Writing down his thoughts plays an important role in this process of teaching himself. The act of writing contributes an important element of discipline to his thinking.

"What I learned from those notebooks is that as hard as Grove drove others, he was harder on himself. He is unsparing in self-criticism. He knew that the speed of the gang is the speed of the boss. No faster."

Two thoughts embedded there jumped out at me:  That writing plays an important role in teaching oneself, and disciplines your thinking, and that he was "unsparing in self-criticism." 

On a personal note, I can emphatically affirm from my experience publishing "Adam Smith, Esq.," that "writing disciplines thinking."  If you haven't tried it lately, I highly recommend it.  And as for "unsparing in self-criticism," while I believe that a true gift for self-criticism is reserved to those with mutant gene sets, inviting honest critiques from colleagues—which you demonstrably, actively listen to—is absolutely indispensable if you care to grow and expand your competence and professionalism.

Not bad starting points, even for those of us who are not the CEO of Intel.