High Output Management

by Andrew S. Grove

then be promoted into a more complex, uncertain, ambiguous job.

promotion from within tends to be the approach favored by corporations with strong corporate cultures.

Bring young people in at relatively low-level, well-defined jobs with low CUA factors, and over time they will share experiences with their peers, supervisors, and subordinates and will learn the values, objectives, and methods of the organization.

what do we do when for some reason we have to hire a senior person from outside the company?

All we can do is cross our fingers and hope she quickly forgets self-interest and just as quickly gets on top of her job to reduce her CUA factor.

expectations can be as binding as a legal document.

unless the divisions are willing to sacrifice self-interest in favor of the common interest, the training sessions can easily become disjointed free-for-alls and confuse everybody.

management is a team activity.

the team will perform only as well as the individuals on it.

everything we’ve considered so far is useless unless the members of our team will continually try t...

elicit peak individual p...

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 ...

if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if t...

a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.

motivation has to come from within somebody. Accordingly, all a manager can do is create an environment in which motivated people can flourish.

What matters is if he performs better or worse because his environment changed.

motivation was based mostly on fear of punishment.

emergence of the new, humanistic approaches to motivation can be traced to the decline in the relative importance of manual labor and the corresponding rise in the importance of so-called knowledge workers.