“We’re paranoid,” the boss of one of the world’s best-known businesses said last week at an off-the-record event. He was echoing Andrew Grove, the late head of Intel, who wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive.
I doubt either of them really meant that they, or their businesses, suffered from paranoia, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a mental illness characterised by delusions of persecutions”.
They meant they were always in a state of high vigilance, constantly alert to what might go wrong. As Grove wrote: “I worry about products getting screwed up . . . I worry about hiring the right people, and I worry about morale slacking off.”