Agreed that Google's facing a serious threat and that a CEO approaches things differently in that situation than when everything's booming. I'm not sure about the peacetime/wartime stuff though. First of all if you want to use military analogies, Google has been at war with Microsoft since 2005 or earlier, and with Apple for a few years as well; now they've got another major front with Facebook -- and they're losing. It's a very different situation than Intel's, so the CEO may need to have different skills and attitude.<p>And then the list of differences between a wartime and peacetime CEO is just silly. "Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture" ... hmm, seems to me that George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Winston Churchill all did a lot of culture defining, and so did Andy Grove.<p>It's interesting though to look at the list in light of his self-description that "One could easily argue that I failed as a peacetime CEO, but succeeded as a wartime one." To me it seems like he's describing the CEO he became, and arguing that it was optimal to become that way because they were at war. And quite possibly it <i>was</i> optimal for him and his company in that situation. But going from there to "these are the characteristics a CEO needs when at peace/at war" is over-generalizing.