One of Grove’s key contributions to business thinking is his “only the paranoid survive” management philosophy. In his book of the same name, he argues that a company in pursuit of a stronger competitive advantage never rests and coined the term strategic inflection point, describing it as “an event that changes the way we think and act” – the moment when a business must adapt quickly to massive change, or fail. In the mid-1980s, Grove gambled Intel on microprocessors over memory chips, at a time when the PC industry was in its infancy.

Named “the father of OKR (Objectives and Key Results)” by John Doerr in 2018, a management methodology that became central to the culture at Google, Grove also helped create the Intel Architecture Laboratory, realising the importance innovation and developing software in time to take advantage of the new microprocessors.