Andy Grove

Grove was Intel's president from 1979, chief executive from 1987 to 1998 and chairman from 1997 to 2005. As president he was central to the mid-1980s exit from DRAM memory chips and the concentration on microprocessors; as chief executive he led Intel to a dominant position in PC microprocessors. Time named him 1997 Man of the Year as the person most responsible for the growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips.

In 1985 Grove decided that Intel would not license its new 386 microprocessor to other chipmakers, making Intel its sole source, a move the museum calls risky and unorthodox. In 1991 Intel launched the 'Intel Inside' campaign proposed by marketing chief Dennis Carter, making a component a consumer brand, and Intel processors with Microsoft software became known as 'Wintel'.

At Intel he built a management culture around the constructive confrontation of problems and highly quantitative management by objectives, an approach that John Doerr, who learned it there, later popularised as OKRs. His ideas are set out in High Output Management (1983) and Only the Paranoid Survive (1996), whose phrase 'strategic inflection point' entered business vocabulary, and he lectured at Stanford's business school.

In late 1994, after a flaw in Intel's Pentium chip became public, Intel at first replaced chips only for customers who could show they needed one, and Grove denied that typical users were affected. After IBM suspended shipments of Pentium-based PCs and criticism grew, Intel announced a no-questions-asked exchange and set aside $475 million; Time says Grove changed course after a weekend with his advisers.

This is consistent with a leader who reverses a publicly defended position once customers' reaction makes it untenable, though here the reversal came only after a delay. Belief Updating

Tedlow reports that when Intel was promoting a RISC chip, with Grove himself in a promotional video, two of his executives, including marketing chief Dennis Carter, told him 'Andy, you can't do this': abandoning Intel's mainstream design would sacrifice one of its most profitable franchises. They won the argument, and Grove later said he had almost walked away from that franchise.

This is consistent with a management style that invited blunt argument from subordinates and could be overruled by it, as told by Tedlow from Grove's own account. Conflict Tolerance

As Japanese makers cut memory-chip prices, Intel's profit fell from $198 million in 1984 to under $2 million in 1985, and Stanford's case describes the decision its top management faced at the end of 1984 over leaving DRAMs. Intel then exited DRAMs and concentrated on microprocessors; Burgelman finds that middle managers and manufacturing allocations had already shifted before official strategy changed, and Grove, then president, later said he and Moore decided by asking what a new CEO would do.

This is consistent with a willingness to stake the company's future on a new business while the old one was still part of its identity, though the shift was also driven from below. Risk Tolerance