“If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do? … Why shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back and do it ourselves?”
The Replacement CEO
From Only the Paranoid Survive (Doubleday, 1996), Chapter 5. In the middle of 1985, Intel had been losing money on memory chips for almost a year, undercut by Japanese manufacturers producing higher-quality parts at lower prices. Meetings produced nothing but conflicting proposals.
Moore answered “without hesitation”: “He would get us out of memories.” Grove stared at him, “numb.” By Intel’s own 1984 annual report, microprocessors were already “our greatest growth area.” The answer was already obvious inside the company. But “Intel equaled memories in all of our minds,” Grove writes. “How could we give up our identity?” Saying “get us out of memories” meant saying Intel’s founding product was finished, and no one who had built the company could bring themselves to say that. The thought experiment worked because it asked a different question: what would someone who had never built the company do? Someone with no history to protect would look at the numbers and act. Moore’s instant answer showed that everyone already knew.