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Decision-making a struggle between emotion, intellect, Intel’s Andy Grove tells HBS degree candidates
BOSTON -- Citing his battle with prostate cancer as well as career and business decisions that made him a pioneering force in Silicon Valley, Intel chairman Andrew Grove said that each pivotal decision he’s ever made has been fraught with “intuition and analysis."
Speaking at Class Day exercises at Harvard Business School on Wednesday afternoon (June 7), Grove described his youth in Communist-held Hungary to more than 875 MBA candidates, their families, and faculty.
In crisscrossing the streets of Budapest, Grove realized that his own journey through life would be filled with crossroads and intersections, and that taking the road less traveled might, indeed, make all the difference.
Deciding to flee from Hungary as a teenager during the 1954 uprising... switching from chemistry to engineering while an undergraduate at City College of New York... pursuring graduate study on the west coast at Berkeley rather than MIT... turning down a prestigious job offer at Bell Laboratories to work at the then relatively unknown yet entrepreneurial Fairchild Semiconductor -- all these were choices with various degrees of risk that had a longlasting impact on his life, Grove explained.
More recently, in his treatment regimen for prostate cancer, he said, “I did not trust anyone else’s analysis. I took greater risks and made controversial choices."
Advising the Harvard MBAs-to-be, Grove noted that although they had already made many choices about the likes of schools and jobs, there were still many decisions to come. "Follow the tracks of the tram; you are not through," he remarked. "You must use intuition and analysis, not intuition or analysis. When you use both together, you achieve the optimal result.