Paranoid survivor

摘要

Earlier this year Andrew Grove taught a class at Stanford Business School. As a living legend in Silicon Valley and a former boss of Intel, the world's leading chipmaker, Dr Grove could have simply used the opportunity to blow his own trumpet. Instead he started by displaying a headline from the Wall Street Journal heralding the recent takeover of General Motors by the American government as the start of "a new era". He gave a potted history of his own industry's spectacular rise, pointing out that plenty of venerable firms-with names like Digital, Wang and ibm-were nearly or completely wiped out along the way.