High Output Management

by Andrew S. Grove

Being second best in a tough environment is just not good enough.

What are the rules of the new environment? First, everything happens faster. Second, anything that can be done will be done, if not by you, then by someone else. Let there be no misunderstanding: These changes lead to a less kind, less gentle, and less predictable workplace.

The first is an output-oriented approach to management.

The second idea is that the work of a business, of a government bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams.

The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.

High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.

A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it.

Its main purposes are mutual education and the exchange of information.

You own it as a sole proprietor. You must compete with millions of individuals every day, and every day you must enhance your value, hone your competitive advantage, learn, adapt, get out of the way, move from job to job, even from industry to industry if you must and retrench if you need to do so in order to start again. The key task is to manage your career so that you do not become a casualty.

Are you adding real value or merely passing information along? How do you add more value? By continually looking for ways to make things truly better in your department.

Are you plugged into what’s happening around you? And that includes what’s happening inside your company as well as inside your industry as a whole. Or do you wait for a supervisor or others to interpret whatever is happening?

Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?

A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

It’s not about how smart you are or how well you know your business; it’s about how that translates to the team’s performance and output.

“When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.” This insight enables a manager to dramatically focus her efforts. All you can do to improve the output of an employee is motivate and train. There is nothing else.

Either employees are not capable or motivated. Only thing you can do is motivate and train.

today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.”

A test might be to imagine yourself delivering a tough performance review to your friend. Do you cringe at the thought? If so, don’t make friends at work. If your stomach remains unaffected, you are likely to be someone whose personal relationships will strengthen work relationships.

there are only two ways in which a manager can impact an employee’s output: motivation and training.

These are to build and deliver products in response to the demands of the customer at a scheduled delivery time, at an acceptable quality level, and at the lowest possible cost.

The key idea is that we construct our production flow by starting with the longest (or most difficult, or most sensitive, or most expensive) step and work our way back.

All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.

A common rule we should always try to heed is to detect and fix any problem in a production process at the lowest-value stage possible.

because indicators direct one’s activities, you should guard against overreacting. This you can do by pairing indicators, so that together both effect and counter-effect are measured.

The principle of variable inspection applied to managerial work nicely skirts both problems, and, as we shall see, gives us an important tool for improving managerial productivity.

The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence

When things aren’t working as smoothly as they should, he applies a bit of oil. And, of course, he provides intelligence to the machine to direct its purpose.

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

Beyond relaying facts, a manager must also communicate his objectives, priorities, and preferences as they bear on the way certain tasks are approached.

On the other hand, a supervisor in a company, large or small, who takes his work seriously exemplifies to his associates the most important managerial value of all.

How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader.

mostly information-gathering and -giving, but also decision-making and nudging.

Work done in advance of the planning meeting obviously has great leverage.

The art of management lies in the capacity to select from the many activities of seemingly comparable significance the one or two or three that provide leverage well beyond the others and concentrate on them.

if you have a choice you should delegate those activities you know best.

To gain better control of his time, the manager should use his calendar as a “production” planning tool, taking a firm initiative to schedule work that is not time-critical between those “limiting steps” in the day.

1. You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2. You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.

Instead this inventory should consist of things you need to do but don’t need to finish right away—discretionary projects, the kind the manager can work on to increase his group’s productivity over the long term. Without such an inventory of projects, a manager will most probably use his free time meddling in his subordinates’ work.

Manager should carry a list of projects which are not urgent but worth keeping on the radar to think & plan around.

As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.

a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged.

mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision.

Its main purpose is mutual teaching and exchange of information.

One on one

you should have one-on-ones frequently (for example, once a week) with a subordinate who is inexperienced in a specific situation and less frequently (perhaps once every few weeks) with an experienced veteran.

A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate’s meeting, with its agenda and tone set by him. There’s good reason for this. Somebody needs to prepare for the meeting.

Emphasis should be on indicators that signal trouble. The meeting should also cover anything important that has happened since the last meeting: current hiring problems, people problems in general, organizational problems and future plans, and—very, very important—potential problems. Even when a problem isn’t tangible, even if it’s only an intuition that something’s wrong, a subordinate owes it to his supervisor to tell him, because it triggers a look into the organizational black box.

The most important criterion governing matters to be talked about is that they be issues that preoccupy and nag the subordinate. These are often obscure and take time to surface, consider, and resolve.

“The good time users among managers do not talk to their subordinates about their problems but they know how to make the subordinates talk about theirs.”

Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate’s work for two weeks, or for some eighty-plus hours, and also upgrade your understanding of what he’s doing.

A staff meeting is one in which a supervisor and all of his subordinates participate, and which therefore presents an opportunity for interaction among peers.

The figure opposite shows that the supervisor’s most important roles are being a meeting’s moderator and facilitator, and controller of its pace and thrust. Ideally, the supervisor should keep things on track, with the subordinates bearing the brunt of working the issues.

The supervisor’s effort at a staff meeting should go into keeping the discussion on track, with the subordinates bearing the brunt of working the issues.