BOOKS: SURVIVING IN DIGITAL TIMES

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But if Grove's book is a great help in spotting a 10x change, it offers little advice on how to survive one. Of course the solution to that problem would doubtless be worth more than Intel's insanely profitable microchip business. For many companies, life in the digital age means placing expensive, high-risk bets on the future and hoping against the odds that they are the right ones. But the record of even the industry's wisest CEOs shows how often the wagers are wrong: witness the disasters Time Warner (Interactive TV), General Motors (electric cars) and Sony (Minidiscs). Their executives somehow passed through the bountiful buffet of American business and picked out the losers. Grove, more often than not, has dined on sweetbreads.

It is tempting to read all this as a morality tale of sorts. In the meritocracy that is late 20th century America, good luck and good work are allegedly indistinguishable. As the saying goes, you make your own breaks. Grove would certainly agree. Having arrived in the U.S. in 1956 from Hungary with little more than an education, he has ample reason to feel that way. But for all his attempts to codify and quantify the rules of high-tech business success, it is hard to miss the loopy logic of a poker table in the pages of this book: the paranoid may survive, but only the lucky get rich.

--By Joshua Cooper Ramo