Here are ten of my favorite Grove quotations:

o Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

o When a change in how some element of one’s business is conducted becomes an order of magnitude larger than what that business is accustomed to, then all bets are off. There’s wind, then there’s a typhoon, there are waves and then a tsunami. A 10X change.

o Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.

o You can’t judge the significance of strategic inflection points by the quality of the first version. You need to draw on your experience…you must discipline yourself to think things through and separate the quality of the early versions from the longer-term potential and significance of a new product or technology.

o We learned that high market share was critical for success, and that to get to market share we had to be willing to invest in manufacturing capacity. Such investments involve big bets because they have to be made in advance of actual demand.

o Bad companies are destroyed by crisis. Good companies survive them. Great companies are improved by them.

o When the basics of the business are undergoing profound change, [existing management] must adopt an outsider’s intellectual objectivity…unfettered by an emotional attachment to the past.

o Your career is your business, and you are its CEO.

o Tensions exist…Someone who is doing videoconferencing wants to keep a [coder/decoder] proprietary to the videoconferencing product. The people who are responsible for microprocessors want to give those videoconferencing products away for free. [We give it away] and the world trusts us…But they trust us because we have not created an additional business that was successful.

o A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

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