High Output Management

by Andrew S. Grove

Most of us have had to struggle to answer that question. What we actually do is difficult to pin down and sum up. Much of it often seems so inconsequential that our position in the business hardly seems justified.

Part of the problem here stems from the distinction between our activities, which is what we actually do, and our output, which is what we achieve.

The latter seems important, significant, and worthwhile. The former often seems trivial,...

My day always ends

when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.

There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.

A manager must keep many balls in the air at the same time and shift his energy and attention to activities that will most increase the output of his organization.

In other words, he should move to the point where his leverage w...

As you can see, much of my day is spent acquiring information. And as you can also see, ...

I have to confess that the information most useful to me, and I suspect most useful to all managers, comes from quick, often casual verbal exchanges.

why are written reports necessary at all?

What they do is constitute an archive of data, help to validate ad hoc inputs, and catch, in safety-net fashion, anything you may have missed.

Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.

To improve and maintain your capacity to get information, you have to understand the way it

comes to you.

Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned.

Beyond relaying facts, a manager must also communicate his objectives, priorities, and preferences as they bear on the way certain tasks are approached. This is extremely important, because only if the manager imparts these will his subordinates know how to make decisions themselves that will be acceptable to the manager, their supervisor.

Thus, transmitting objectives and preferred approaches constitutes a key to successful delegation.

The third major kind of managerial activity, of course, is decision-making.

once in a while we managers in fact make a decision.

But for every time that happens, we participate in the making of many, many others, and we do...

We provide factual inputs or just offer opin...

the pros and cons of alternatives and thereby force a better decision to emerge, we review decisions made or about to be made by others, encourage...

decisions can be separated into two kinds.

The forward-looking sort are made, for example, in the capital authorization process.

Here we allocate the financial resources of the company among various...

second type is made as we respond to a developing problem or a crisis, which can either be technical (a quality control problem, for example) or involve ...

decision-making depends finally on how well you comprehend the facts and issu...

This is why information-gathering is so important in a manager’s life. Other activities—conveying information, making decisions, and being a role model for your subordinates—are all governed by the base of information that you, the manager, have about the tas...

information-gathering is the basis of all other managerial work, which is why I choose to spend...

reality, for every unambiguous decision we make, we probably nudge things a dozen times.

role models for people in our organization—our subordinates, our peers, and even our supervisors. Much has been said and written about a manager’s need to be a leader. The fact is, no single managerial activity can be said to constitute leadership, and nothing leads as well as example.

All managers need to act so that they can be seen exerting influence, but they should do so in their own way.

A great deal of a manager’s work has to do with allocating resources: manpower, money, and capital. But the single most important resource that we allocate from one day to the next is our own time.

In principle more money, more manpower, or more capital can always be made available, but our own time is the one absolutely finite resource we each have.

Its allocation and use therefore deserve considerable attention. How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important a...

you must choose the most effective medium for what you want to accomplish, and that is the one that gives you the greatest leverage.

Leverage of Managerial Activity

We’ve established that the output of a manager is the output of the various organizations under his control and his influence. What ca...

for every activity a manager performs—A1, A2, and so on—the output of the organization should increase by some degree.

A manager’s output is thus the sum of the result of individual activities having varying degrees of leverage. Clearly the key to high output means being sensitive to the leverage of what you do during the day.

Managerial productivity—that is, the output of a manager per unit of time worked—can be increased in three ways:

1. Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work.

Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities.

Shifting the mix of a manager’s activities from those with lower to those...

HIGH-LEVERAGE ACTIVITIES

be achieved in three basic ways:

When many people are affected by one manager.

• When a person’s activity or behavior over a long period of time is affected by a manager’s brief, well-focused set of words or actions.

When a large group’s work is affected by an individual supplying a unique, key piece of...