“You’re being paranoid,” people will tell you with a sneer. But being paranoid is good.
I saw the other day somebody promoting Andy Grove—the previous CEO of Intel—his book and attitude of Only the Paranoid Survive. I still remember the Fortune magazine article where I first saw him talk about his book. I never spoke to anybody about that. It seemed so distant and far away—America in those days—and the high-tech industry of chips seemed so high-tech.
But I realized that Grove was making a very important statement. I think a lot of businesses in the country at that time had no clue of the changes they would be facing, and how many of them would soon go out of business. But for those of us who have worked in very large industrial companies, there is so much arrogance—from the top to the bottom—that if you spoke about things like this, they’d laugh at you.
All of them are trying to be clever and creeping up each other’s arses. There’s so much brown-nosing going on that in the mornings you see brown faces filled with it.
But anyway—the point is—I read that magazine article over and over and realized that I had to be paranoid. Paranoid in my life, paranoid in my job, which was a very high-pressure job requiring a lot of crucial decision-making and creativity. Now, not everybody’s got creativity, and I had to use my own creativity and tap into networks that I cultivated to develop that creativity to survive.
Did I survive? Well, some of the major things, yes—but I don’t think I was paranoid enough. I knew that the government would collapse many businesses. Many businesses, 30 years ago, already started leaving the country—shutting up their factories and leaving. They knew the writing was on the wall. These were the smart ones. These were the paranoid that would survive and go on and invest elsewhere.
But then I wasn’t paranoid enough and didn’t have enough insight into the Johannesburg property market. You might say no one knew, but I say I should have seen the signs. I should have realized that the Johannesburg property market was going to crumble. I got burned. Anyway, it’s a salutary lesson.
Now, today, you have all of these academics that are rushing to talk about “horizon scanning,” and they’re coming up with dumb little papers. But that’s not what business is made of. Business is made of guts. Life is made of guts. It requires guts, determination, questioning, not taking the obvious—being what other people would seem to think is angry and cynical. But that’s what it takes. Even belligerent.
That’s why Grove said vice presidents who didn’t challenge him and didn’t argue with him were useless.
Everybody wants to be nice. But nice doesn’t get you anywhere, really. It doesn’t.
Anyway—only the paranoid survive. Examine your life and business and see where you are not being paranoid enough.
