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Moore is a shy, methodical man. He has the careful outlook of someone who has spent his life trying to get molecules to behave. Early on Moore saw something special in the young Hungarian and decided to nurture it. In 1970, as the two were strolling through the zoo in Washington, D.C., Moore told Grove, "One day you'll run Intel." For the next two decades Moore shaped and polished Grove's thinking about everything from plastic packaging to Japanese trade. "He was," says Grove, "a father figure." In 1979 Grove became president, and when Moore stepped down as CEO of Intel in 1987, Grove stepped up. (At 68, Moore still works three days a week but probably not for the money: he holds close to $7 billion worth of Intel stock.)
For all the fear it inspires in competitors, Intel looks harmless enough. The firm's Santa Clara headquarters is an off-blue Dilbert maze, a land of cubicles, coffee cups and security badges. Bob Noyce, who died in 1990, smiles reassuringly from a 5-ft.-high black-and-white photo in the lobby. Inside, Grove and Moore work from 8-ft.-by-9-ft. cubicles accessible to anyone bold enough to wander by for a chat. There are no special privileges. If Grove rolls in late, he has to prowl Intel's jammed lot looking for a space just like any shavetail engineer. Craig Barrett, 58, Intel's president, sometimes shows up in lizard cowboy boots, often en route to his ranch in Montana from Japan or Malaysia. They are known universally as Andy and Craig. The just-folks culture did not originate at Intel--credit Bill Hewlett and David Packard--but Intel perfected the industrial-size version. Last winter the company announced that all its employees would begin to receive lucrative stock options. Already Intel has produced thousands of millionaires.
Do not confuse casual with unchallenging. Grove sets the tone, and it is always demanding. The people (mostly men) who work for him have inherited (and enforce) an engineer's creed that brings a bloodless "just fix it" intensity to everything from human relations to fabrication. "When I was at Intel, one of the most important values was discipline," says venture capitalist John Doerr, who worked for the firm for six years in the 1970s. "Andy Grove had no tolerance for people who were late or meetings that ran on without a purpose. It wasn't that he was a hard ass; it's just the nature of their business. There's no room for error."
For years Grove enforced that narrow margin with a quick, violent temper--the polar opposite of his mentor, Moore. New employees at Intel suspected it was a management trick: Andy getting mad to get results. What they discovered was that the anger was real. Grove had an internal code of excellence, and when someone didn't live up to it, he hammered him. In 1984 FORTUNE named him one of America's toughest bosses. Sometimes even he recognized that he had gone too far. "After I cooled down, I apologized," he wrote of one '80s encounter that had him bellowing at a manager. "But by then it was too late. A loyal, experienced and valuable manager had been so hurt that no apology could get through to him."