1: I’m often credited with the motto, “Only the paranoid survive,” former Intel Chairman and CEO Andy Grove writes in his legendary business book of the same name.
“I have no idea when I first said this,” Andy notes, “but the fact remains that, when it comes to business, I believe in the value of paranoia.”
Why?
Because “business success contains the seeds of its own destruction,” he observes. “The more successful we are, the more people want a chunk of our business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing left.”
So, how does this paranoia shape a manager’s core responsibility?
“To guard constantly against other people’s attacks and to inculcate this guardian attitude in the people under his or her management.”
2: Quality expert W. Edwards Deming urged companies to remove fear from the workplace.
Andy takes a different view: “I have trouble with the simplemindedness of this dictum. The most important role of managers is to create an environment in which people are passionately dedicated to winning in the marketplace.”
And, “fear plays a major role in creating and maintaining such passion,” he notes. “Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.”
Ultimately, Andy maintains that leaders must create a culture where the entire organization fears losing.
“We can only do that if we feel it ourselves,” he says. “If we fear that someday, any day, some development somewhere in our environment will change the rules of the game, our associates will sense and share that dread. They will be on the lookout.”
That constant vigilance is the goal.
“They will be constantly scanning their radar screens,” he explains. “This may bring a lot of spurious warnings of strategic inflection points that turn out to be false alarms, but it’s better to pay attention to these, to analyze them one at a time and make an effort to dispose of them, than to miss the significance of an environmental change that could damage your business forever.”
3: Andy believes fear has been a big part of his success formula. It led him from being associate #3 at Intel’s founding to transforming the company into the world’s largest semiconductor company for many years, with a market capitalization reaching $274 billion.
“It is fear,” he writes, “that makes me scan my e-mail at the end of a long day, searching for problems: news of disgruntled customers, potential slippages in the development of a new product, rumors of unhappiness on the part of key employees.
“It is fear that every evening makes me read the trade press reports on competitors’ new developments and leads me to tear out particularly ominous articles to take to work for follow-up the next day.
“It is fear,” Andy observes, “that gives me the will to listen to Cassandras when all I want to do is cry out, ‘Enough already, the sky isn’t falling,’ and go home.
“Simply put, fear can be the opposite of complacency,” he writes. “Complacency often afflicts precisely those who have been the most successful. It is often found in companies that have honed the sort of skills that are perfect for their environment.”
This vigilance is critical because, as Andy warns, sooner or later, something fundamental in our business world will change.
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Where in my life or leadership have I slipped into quiet complacency, assuming that what worked yesterday will still work tomorrow, instead of staying alert to new threats and shifts in my environment?
Action: Identify one area of my work or organization that has been successful for a long time, list two or three emerging risks or disruptions that could threaten it, and schedule time this week to investigate them and discuss possible responses with my team.