I was saddened by the death of Andy Grove, the former Intel CEO who drove the growth of Silicon Valley.
Andy Grove’s “High Output Management” has been my go-to book on running teams and improving business processes. I have seen few books like it: it offers a clean, clear, distinctly common-sense engineering perspective on day-to-day issues that managers face. I have internalized multiple messages from this book, such as its approach to one-on-ones (their importance and structure) and its guidance on team sizes. This book stands in sharp contrast to many “Leadership BS” books: it offers practical no-nonsense advice and guidance, rather than noble-sounding but impractical tidbits.
I loved how Andy Grove talked about himself in that book, too: “I am an engineer by training and a manager of a high technology company by profession.” I wish I could run technology companies like he did. I wish I could write about it like he did, too. I am actively working in both these directions. Andy Grove was my role model; he will be missed.
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About Maria Gorlatova
Dr. Maria Gorlatova is the Sternberg Family Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University. Her research centers on pervasive computing technologies, with a focus on spatial computing and next-generation augmented reality. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University and her M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees (Summa Cum Laude) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada. She spent two years at Princeton University’s Electrical Engineering Department as an Associate Research Scholar and Associate Director of the Princeton University EDGE Lab. Dr. Gorlatova was named one of the N2Women Rising Stars and has received multiple awards, including the NSF CAREER Award, the DARPA Young Faculty Award (YFA), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship, the IEEE ISMAR 2025 Best Paper Award, the IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications, and research awards from Meta, Cisco, and IBM. She served as the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE IPSN 2023, the General Co-Chair of the 2025 NSF Workshop on Networking and Systems Challenges in Immersive Computing, and the TPC Co-chair of ACM/IEEE SenSys 2025.
