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Grove's dogma of relentless change and fearless leadership echoes from IBM in Armonk, N.Y., to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. He is a perennial cover boy for the business magazines. Yet, he insists in his usual point-blank locution, "I haven't changed." He is a protective father of two daughters (he has asked us not to reveal their names or occupations), a spirited teacher (his Stanford business-school course is an annual sellout) and, almost incidentally, is worth more than $300 million. His 5-ft. 9-in. frame--honed by hourlong morning workouts, coiled by nervous energy--seems as tightly wired as one of his microprocessors.
At work he operates from the same kind of cubicle that everyone else at the company gets. (One perk: a view. Of the parking lot.) He keeps a support staff of three busy. He has developed his own special "mail codes"--f/u for "follow up"--that let him zip through his In box with special efficiency. A faithful assistant once put together a Grove-to-English dictionary for new assistants bewildered by the CEO's avalanche of time-saving abbreviations.
Grove is not all work: he skis, bikes with his wife Eva, listens to opera. He occasionally breaks out into a wild, disjointed boogie (his kids call it groving instead of grooving and recall the time Eva snapped her ankle on their shag carpet as the two danced to the sound track of Hair). The dance step is typical: Grove is a passionate, if disjointed man. He is a famously tough manager who, late at night, can still fill Intel's offices with a rolling laugh. He is a man who lost most of his hearing when he was young, but who soldiered through the toughest science classes flawlessly by lip reading and compulsive study. (His hearing would later be restored after five reconstructive operations over 20 years.) And though Grove says he is a "whiner" when it comes to minor ailments, he is a man who coldly eyed a diagnosis of prostate cancer, researched the options and ignored his doctors' advice to pursue his own, so far successful, therapy. "Ruthless intellectual honesty" is the way friends describe Grove's strongest characteristic. Andy has another word for it: "Fear."
Andras Grof was born on Sept. 2, 1936, in Budapest, the son of George, the dairyman, and Maria, a bookkeeping clerk. His father, a gregarious, easygoing man with a strong, logical mind, left school early and taught himself business and accounting--everything he needed to know to run a small dairy service. Grove's mother, a spare, lovely woman, raised him in their two-room 19th century apartment. From an early age Grove was marked as the son of a capitalist and as a Jew. His parents hoped that with hard work he could overcome the prejudices.
At age 4 he nearly died. Budapest was swept by a scarlet fever epidemic, and young Andras succumbed. He remembers waking up in the hospital and thinking to himself, "I'm dead. I'm in my grave looking up at the sky." The fever left a mark: his eardrums were perforated like a colander, the result of a middle-ear infection.