When Andy Grove got his PhD from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, in 1963, he was a corporate recruiter’s dream candidate. He had a number of job options, perhaps the best of which was with Bell Labs, then the Mecca of research in solid-state physics. But Grove made a different choice. Rather than head for Bell Labs, he joined Fairchild Semiconductor, a West Coast upstart, where he worked under the legendary Gordon Moore, who led the company’s research operation. That was an early example of out-of-the-box thinking from Grove, who five years later left Fairchild with Moore and others to co-found Intel. After he succeeded Moore as Intel’s CEO in 1987, Grove took other steps that shunned conventional logic — perhaps most visibly during the “Intel Inside” campaign of the 1990s. Back then, the most recognized brands in the computer industry were hardware makers such as IBM or software firms like Microsoft.…