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At Intel, a one-on-one is a meeting between a supervisor and a subordinate, and it is the principal way their business relationship is maintained. Its main purpose is mutual teaching and exchange of information.
but a family one-on-one very much resembles a business one-on-one. I strongly recommend both practices.
Staff meetings also create opportunities for the supervisor to learn from the exchange and confrontation that often develops. In my own case, I get a much better understanding of an issue with which I am not familiar by listening to two people with opposing views discuss it than I do by listening to one side only.
What should be discussed at a staff meeting? Anything that affects more than two of the people present. If the meeting degenerates into a conversation between two people working on a problem affecting only them, the supervisor should break it off and move on to something else that will include more of the staff, while suggesting that the two continue their exchange later.
A supervisor should never use staff meetings to pontificate, which is the surest way to undermine free discussion and hence the meeting’s basic purpose.
Unlike a process-oriented meeting, which is a regularly scheduled affair held to exchange knowledge and information, the mission-oriented meeting is usually held ad hoc and is designed to produce a specific output, frequently a decision.
Once the meeting is over, the chairman must nail down exactly what happened by sending out minutes that summarize the discussion that occurred, the decision made, and the actions to be taken. And it’s very important that attendees get the minutes quickly, before they forget what happened.
Making decisions—or more properly, participating in the process by which they are made—is an important and essential part of every manager’s work from one day to the next.
in businesses that mostly deal with information and know-how, a manager has to cope with a new phenomenon. Here a rapid divergence develops between power based on position and power based on knowledge, which occurs because the base of knowledge that constitutes the foundation of the business changes rapidly.
Put another way, even if today’s veteran manager was once an outstanding engineer, he is not now the technical expert he was when he joined the company.
ideal model of decision-making in a know-how business. The first stage should be free discussion, in which all points of view and all aspects of an issue are openly welcomed and debated.
The next stage is reaching a clear decision. Again, the greater the disagreement about the issue, the more important becomes the word clear.
Finally, everyone involved must give the decision reached by the group full support. This does not necessarily mean agreement: so long as the participants commit to back the decision, that is a satisfactory outcome.
But an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business.
The model is also hard to implement because anybody who makes a business decision also possesses emotions such as pride, ambition, fear, and insecurity. These tend to come to the surface quickly when people who are not used to working with one another are asked to make a decision.
When the chairman was brought back in, he sat down and listened for a while and couldn’t believe things either. We watched him lean forward as if he were trying to glean more from the conversation. We then saw a black cloud form over his head; finally he slapped the table and exclaimed, “What’s going on here? You people are talking in circles and getting nowhere.” After the chairman intervened, the problem was resolved in very short order. We named this the peer-plus-one approach, and have used it since then to aid decision-making where we must.
Peers tend to look for a more senior manager, even if he is not the most competent or knowledgeable person involved, to take over and shape a meeting.
One of the reasons why people are reluctant to come out with an opinion in the presence of their peers is the fear of going against the group by stating an opinion that is different from that of the group.
You can overcome the peer-group syndrome if each of the members has self-confidence, which stems in part from being familiar with the issue under consideration and from experience. But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this.
As a manager, you should remind yourself that each time an insight or fact is withheld and an appropriate question is suppressed, the decision-making process is less good than it might have been.
Sometimes no amount of discussion will produce a consensus, yet the time for a decision has clearly arrived. When this happens, the senior person (or “peer-plus-one”) who until now has guided, coached, and prodded the group along has no choice but to make a decision himself.
The criterion to follow is this: don’t push for a decision prematurely. Make sure you have heard and considered the real issues rather than the superficial comments that often dominate the early part of a meeting.
one of the manager’s key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance: • What decision needs to be made? • When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? • Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? • Who will ratify or veto the decision? • Who will need to be informed of the decision?
Employing consistent ways by which decisions are to be made has value beyond simply expediting the decision-making itself.
Planning: Today’s Actions for Tomorrow’s Output
Most people think “planning” is one of the loftier responsibilities of management—we all learned somewhere that “a manager plans, organizes, controls.” In fact, planning is an ordinary everyday activity; it’s something all of us do all the time with no fanfare, in both our personal and professional lives.
As we learned in Chapter 2, the key method of controlling the future output of a factory is through the use of a system of forecasting demand and building to forecast.
Your general planning process should consist of analogous thinking. Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organization? Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed? Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now doing? Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2. Namely, what more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand?
As you formulate in words what you plan to do, the most abstract and general summary of those actions meaningful to you is your strategy. What you’ll do to implement the strategy is your tactics.
I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today’s gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.
To avoid such a fate, remember that as you plan you must answer the question: What do I have to do today to solve—or better, avoid—tomorrow’s problem?
Finally, remember that by saying “yes”—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitly saying “no” to something else. Each time you make a commitment, you forfeit your chance to commit to something else. This, of course, is an inevitable, inescapable consequence of allocating any finite resource.
The idea behind MBO is extremely simple: If you don’t know where you’re going, you will not get there. Or, as an old Indian saying puts it, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
successful MBO system needs only to answer two questions: 1. Where do I want to go? (The answer provides the objective.) 2. How will I pace myself to see if I am getting there? (The answer gives us milestones, or key results.)
We must realize—and act on the realization—that if we try to focus on everything, we focus on nothing.
Did Columbus perform well even though he failed by strict MBO terms? He did discover the New World, and that was a source of incalculable wealth for Spain. So it is entirely possible for a subordinate to perform well and be rated well even though he missed his specified objective. The MBO system is meant to pace a person—to put a stopwatch in his own hand so he can gauge his own performance.
Earlier, we established the fact that the game of management is a team game: a manager’s output is the output of the organizations under his supervision or influence. We now discover that management is not just a team game, it is a game in which we have to fashion a team of teams, where the various individual teams exist in some suitable and mutually supportive relationship with each other.
Though most are mixed, organizations can come in two extreme forms: in totally mission-oriented form or in totally functional form.
In the mission-oriented organization (a), which is completely decentralized, each individual business unit pursues what it does—its mission—with little tie-in to other units.
At the other extreme is the totally functional organization (b), which is completely centralized.
Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, “Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.”
Here I would like to propose Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.
Instead, the answer lies with middle managers. Within a company, they are, in the first place, numerous enough to cover the entire range of operation; and, in the second place, very close to the problem we’re talking about—namely, generating internal resources and consuming those resources. For middle managers to succeed at this high-leverage task, two things are necessary. First, they must accept the inevitability of the hybrid organizational form if they are to serve its workings. Second, they must develop and master the practice through which a hybrid organization can be managed.
The point is that a strong and positive corporate culture is absolutely essential if dual reporting and decision-making by peers are to work.
A strictly functional organization, which is clear conceptually, tends to remove engineering and manufacturing (or the equivalent groups in your firm) from the marketplace, leaving them with no idea of what the customers want.
Like it or not, the hybrid organization is a fundamental phenomenon of organizational life.
Say you need new tires for your car. You go down the street to the dealer and take a look at the various lines he has to offer. Then you’ll probably go up the street to see what the competition has. Maybe later you’ll turn to a consumer magazine to help you choose. Eventually, you’ll make a decision based on one thing: your own self-interest.
Similarly, our behavior in a work environment can be controlled by three invisible and pervasive means. These are: • free-market forces • contractual obligations • cultural values
When the environment changes more rapidly than one can change rules, or when a set of circumstances is so ambiguous and unclear that a contract between the parties that attempted to cover all possibilities would be prohibitively complicated, we need another mode of control, which is based on cultural values.
Belief and faith are not aspects of the market mode, but stem from adherence to cultural values.
