1: It was the summer of 1985.
One of Silicon Valley’s most legendary meetings was about to happen.
“I was in my office with Intel’s chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore, and we were discussing our quandary,” Andy Grove writes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company.
“Our mood was downbeat,” Andy recalls.
“I looked out the window at the Ferris wheel of the Great America amusement park revolving in the distance, then I turned back to Gordon and I asked, “If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think they would do?”
“They would get us out of memories,” Gordon said unflinchingly.
Andy stared at him, numb.
Then he said, “Why shouldn’t you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”
2: Andy believes he knows the reason that there is such high turnover with CEOs.
“Every day,” he writes, “it seems, leaders who have been with the company for most of their working lives announce their departure, usually as the company is struggling through a period that has the looks of a strategic inflection point.”
Usually, a new CEO is hired from outside.
“I suspect that the people coming in are probably no better managers or leaders than the people they are replacing,” Andy observes.
The incoming CEO has one key advantage.
“But it may be crucial,” he reasons.
“Unlike the person who has devoted their entire life to the company and therefore has a history of deep involvement in the sequence of events that led to the present mess, the new managers come unencumbered by such emotional involvement and therefore are capable of applying an impersonal logic to the situation.
“They can see things much more objectively than their predecessors did,” Andy writes.
3: The lesson?
“If existing management wants to keep their jobs when the basics of the business are undergoing profound change,” he explains, “they must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity.
“They must do what they need to do to get through the strategic inflection point unfettered by any emotional attachment to the past.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: When I face a “strategic inflection point” in my own work or life, am I willing to set aside my emotional attachment to the past and see the situation with true outsider objectivity?
Action: Take one important challenge I’m facing right now and ask myself Andy Grove’s question—“If I were brought in from the outside, what would I do?”—then write down and seriously consider one bold step that answer suggests.
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