Grove Biography

Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge has a Q&A with Richard Tedlow, author of a new biography of Intel co-founder Andy Grove. An excerpt:

Until 1945, anti-Semitism placed Grove's physical survival at risk. His father's mother was killed in Auschwitz, and other members of his (and his wife's) extended family lost their lives in the Holocaust and because of the fighting in World War II. In 1944 and especially early in 1945, young Andy was a hunted child.

Life under the Communist regime which followed the Soviet defeat of the Germans Grove came to find hateful. Everything about Communist Hungary elevated the lie at the expense of the truth.

Both during the Nazi and Communist eras, knowing what really was going on—finding out the actual truth—was more than once a matter of life and death for the Grove family. Think about it. No wonder Grove's search for the truth in the business world was so intense, so passionate.