If you stroll the blue and white halls at Intel headquarters, chances are you'll hear an argument.

Top managers encourage it. Intel, (INTC) the world's biggest chipmaker, has classes to teach new employees how to argue, even with their bosses.

This attitude goes back to the company's co-founder, Andy Grove. Acquaintances say he likes nothing better than a rousing argument.

But he doesn't argue simply for its own sake, says Eric Dishman, director of Intel's Health Research group at the company campus in Santa Clara, Calif.

Rather, Grove is always learning. He sees argument as a tool to foster his and others' growth.

"He's an instigator who forces people to confront things they don't want to confront," Dishman told IBD. "People think he argues for the sake of argument. That's not true. He wants to come out of every meeting smarter than when he went in."

Grove does make sure to lighten up. "The fact he has a wicked sense of humor helps release the pressure of the debate," Dishman said.

Grove, 70, and Dishman have worked closely the last five years shaping Intel's health care strategy — a huge push for the company right now. Dishman is a social scientist, not an engineer like Grove. But the two men share a passion to improve people's well-being.

Grove's life story shows a man who met tough odds and came out a big winner.

Grove has a mild form of Parkinson's disease. And in the 1990s he successfully battled prostate cancer, a fight that drew him into the medical debate.

Healthy Ideas

Dishman has chronic kidney problems and knows what Grove has gone through.

"We became kindred spirits in trying to get Intel to pay attention to health care," Dishman said.

When Dishman approached him with health ideas, Grove didn't push them onto other Intel executives. Instead, he and Dishman tried to figure out how to generate interest in the subject within the company.

"This man who helped create Intel was brainstorming with me on how to get health care into the company, like he wasn't part of it," Dishman said.

"He has the power where he could say, by edict, 'We're going to do it this way,' " Dishman said. "But he's much smarter than that."

Grove got a lot of his mental acuity from his father, who also loved to argue. In his autobiography, "Swimming Across," Grove describes a raucous home in his native Hungary.

Family and friends who dropped by didn't discuss as much as they argued. They shouted, interrupted and waved their hands.

"At first the loudness of the arguments scared me," he said. "But then I realized that while they were excited, nobody ever got really mad at anyone else."

With that excitement in his veins, Grove felt at home designing with Dishman seminars for Intel executives and employees. The workshops were designed to make them aware of health care's expense and to inspire them to create high-tech products to handle costs.

Problem solving is a skill that Grove acquired early. He needed it to survive.

He's Jewish, and as a youngster survived the takeover of Hungary by Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Many of his relatives didn't. The Nazis murdered his aunt and a large part of his family in concentration camps.

Grove talks about seeing atrocities and death during the Holocaust. After the Russians drove the Germans from his hometown of Budapest, he and his mother returned to the city. His father was not there. The Germans had forced him into labor at the front during the war, and the Russians were holding him in a prisoner-of-war camp.

As they walked through the city's rubble, his mother wouldn't let him linger. She kept him moving. That fortitude led him to later walk through other tough situations.

"We kept walking. At one intersection, I saw a man lying in the street facedown, his legs and arms sprawled out," Grove wrote. "It was the first time I had ever seen a dead body. I kept turning my head to look at him. My mother yanked on my hand and growled, 'Look where you're going.' "

As a baby he had an ear infection. That kept him from swimming later. Eventually he gained too much weight. At 13, he said enough. He was determined to learn to swim.

So he went to an irrigation canal by himself. He knew his ears would be a problem, so he brought earplugs. To gain confidence, he rigged a swimming belt by strapping cork blocks together.

"I worked up the courage to stand on one side of the ditch. I counted one, two . . . three! Then I pushed myself off," he wrote.

In minutes, he was swimming from one side to the other. Later in the day, he took the cork belt off, and he's been a swimmer ever since.

After the Russians drove out the Germans, Grove was subject to repression in communist Hungary.

During the confusion after the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956, Grove escaped. Like other refugees, he trudged through muddy fields and a forest at night to get to Austria, and then made his way to America.

Grove recollects that as he was riding through free Europe on a train, his main thought was how grateful he was.

"After all the years of pretending to believe things that I didn't, of acting the part of someone I wasn't, maybe I would never have to pretend again," he wrote.

He enrolled in the City College of New York and graduated in 1960 with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963, also in chemical engineering.

No. 4 To No. 1

In July 1968, Grove was employee No. 4 at a chip startup called Integrated Electronics Corp., Intel for short. People often say he was the chief engineer of Intel's processes and strategies.

"The DNA of the organization comes from Andy Grove," Dishman said.

Under Grove, Intel grew into the largest semiconductor company in the world, with 2006 sales of $35.4 billion.

In 1979 he became its president, and in 1987 the board named him chief executive.

In 1997 he stepped into the dual role of chairman and CEO.

In May 1998 he turned the CEO title over to Craig Barrett. Seven years later he handed the chairmanship to Barrett while Paul Otellini assumed the CEO spot.

Today Grove is senior adviser to Intel.

BY JAMES DETAR.