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Benefits of Healthy Paranoia
It was almost 20 years ago that Andy Grove, the former CEO and Chairman of Intel, wrote the controversial but popular book Only the Paranoid Survive. His thesis was pretty simple and to the point. He believed that leaders require a certain disposition to succeed, and they should remain in a state of mild to medium paranoia about the future. He believed that both threat and opportunity occur in periods of disequilibrium, or discontinuity. He coined the phrase “strategic inflection points” to describe these particular moments. Grove went on to explain how successful leaders seem to have a certain uncanny sense of timing and a knack for knowing just the right moment to shift position, even if the shift needs to happen ...
