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But the merits of that no-b.s. culture became clear as the world around Intel began to crack. Starting in 1976, the firm sailed into one iceberg after another: weak demand for memory chips, factory problems, ruthless Japanese "dumping." In 1981, when Intel steamed into yet another exhausting chip slowdown, Grove decided that instead of laying off employees he'd order Intel's staff to work 25% harder--two hours a day, every day, for free. The "125% solution" turned Santa Clara into a sweatshop (a few particularly dyspeptic engineers took to wearing sweatbands to highlight the point), but Grove's message was clear: Intel would do whatever it took.
The biggest iceberg came in 1994, when Intel released millions of flawed Pentium chips. The problem was small, an internal routing glitch that caused a mathematical error. Intel took solace from the fact that this occurred so infrequently that most users could leave their PCs on for years without running into a problem. Intel's hyper-rational, Grove-trained engineers told concerned callers not to worry unless they were planning to sweat some advanced astrophysics problems that weekend. The callers hung up and dialed CNN. And the New York Times. And the Wall Street Journal. Grove, who was on a Christmas ski trip at the time, was floored. "He had really punched himself in the face," says one of his daughters, who watched him grimly ride the lifts for three days. "We were all like, 'This too shall pass,' but he just went inside himself."
After a weekend conferring with his top advisers, Grove decided to switch courses, and on Monday, with typical Intel discipline, he turned the company around. By the middle of the next week, Intel had agreed to spend $475 million to replace Pentiums. The company even offered in-home service. It was, says Grove, "a difficult education." It also turned, perhaps, into a bonanza. Intel's name became better known than ever. And once the firm agreed to replace any chips, customers began to appreciate its commitment to getting things right.
The real message was simpler: confronted with another disaster, Intel had survived. Again. It was as if Grove's personality and the characteristics that had served him best over the years--courage in the face of fear, passion in the face of discomfort--had been transmitted like tiny electrons into the substrate of Intel's tens of thousands of employees. Grove had saved the chip. Next it was time to save himself.
"Andy, you have a tumor." He felt a warm unease. Grove is a steely man, but these weren't words he had expected to hear at 58. Grove discovered in late 1994 that he had a tumor growing on the side of his prostate gland. It wasn't immediately life threatening, but the doctors couldn't seem to agree on a course of action.
Grove, the scientist, pursued one on his own. He hit the library. "I read until I found that when I picked up an article, I had read it," he recalls. "I hadn't done that much research since I got my Ph.D." In the mornings Eva would drive to Stanford and copy the latest journals. At night Grove would paw the trove, looking for something new.