This is a perfectly incredible book! It is warmly recommended for both aspiring and practicing managers! There is an entire world to gain from it.

The author is an acclaimed business historian and is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. The subject of the volume is Andy Grove, easily one the world’s most admired business leaders who was Chairman and CEO of Intel in its years of explosive growth.

Legend had, in a manner of speaking, been woven around Grove from childhood. Born in Hungary to Jewish parents in 1936, he survived the holocaust. They were extremely difficult years. From a very young age, he was taught to conceal his Jewishness. In 1942, when he was five-years-old, his father (George) was sent to a labour camp. The fortitude of his mother (Maria) was severely tested. Gaiety had all but disappeared in the Grove household.

Two years later, in 1944, Hungary was caught between the imperialistic designs of both Germany and the former Soviet Union. The Germans occupied Budapest followed by the Russians. One night, a Russian soldier raped his mother.

His father returned to Budapest in 1945. He was one of the few survivors; all the other prisoners died. The Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956. Migration was the natural answer. A year later saw Andy Grove in New York City. He was penniless with all but twenty summers behind him!

He put himself through school, received his first college degree in chemistry from Berkeley in 1950, earned his doctorate (chemistry and physics) from the California Institute of Technology in 1954, married Eva Kastan and came to the Silicon Valley.

Phenomenal growth

The decision was perfectly timed for an ambitious engineer looking for a break. Andy joined Intel at the time of its founding in 1968. This book is about how Andy rose to be its CEO in 1987, and then led the company into the global stratosphere, with a compound annual profit growth of 34% for the next eleven years!

It is a gripping account and contains a graphic history of those eventful years. There are stories about Robert Noyce, (known as the Father of the Silicon Valley); Gordon Moore, who went on to become CEO of Intel; Arthur Rock, who provided the seed money for Intel; Leslie Vadasz, who was with Andy at Fairchild, and Andy himself.

Each depended on the other to collectively string their talents! It was a veritable congruence of talent, opportunity, strategy and skill resulting in a brilliant triad of people, process and performance.

“Silicon Valley,” writes the author, “is a complicated place, and it is about many things. All would agree, though, that one central preoccupation is with growth. Getting big is more important than being big. Getting bigger was also more important than being big.”

Intel went public in December 1971 at  $23.50 per share. By 1990, the stock split eight times! This means one share bought in 1971 had turned into thirty-eight shares! The compound annual rate of return was 24 percent! Intel was becoming big business, with an impressive array of products and superbly positioned for growth!

Andy Grove was far from being the perfect man or even the perfect CEO or the perfect leader. Intel was struggling for survival when Andy was called from his sabbatical to salvage it. What was unique about Grove, says the author, was that he— “built the bridge across the technological chasm between memory and microprocessor and the Intel army marched behind him.”

Sometimes he went too far but he would apologise after cooling down! But it was not always so easy. His anger attacks drove plenty of people away from Intel. His hard tongue could hurt, and sometimes badly! But for those who detected passion in the Grove “therapy”, there is a wealth of gratitude.

According to the author: “For this set of people, Grove was genuinely charismatic. He touched something in them that was beyond the rational. Some of these people do not like one another. They were held together by a sense of fealty, for lack of a better word, to Grove. These people who passed the Grove test share a trait in common. They have an edge. You feel it when you speak to them. Man or woman, religious or atheist, from whatever part of the country or the world... The Intel edge of the Andy era. It made the company great.”

Richard S. Tedlow, Andy Grove: The Life and Time of an American, Penguin Book India, 2007. Price: Rs. 695. Pages: xxii+568