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If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are a lot of them, and many of them are very hungry.
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.
So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.
Are you adding real value or merely passing information along?
Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them?
The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and that ultimately is what this book is about.
“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.”
In our business we have to mix knowledge-power people with position-power people daily, and together they make decisions that could affect us for years to come.
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
Process, assembly, and test operations can be readily applied to other very different kinds of productive work.
whenever possible, you should choose in-process tests over those that destroy product.
The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none.
build to forecast, which is a contemplation of future orders.
What works better is to ask both the manufacturing and the sales departments to prepare a forecast, so that people are responsible for performing against their own predictions.
A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence
individual contributors who gather and disseminate know-how and information should also be seen as middle managers, because they exert great power within the organization.
he should move to the point where his leverage will be the greatest.
the information most useful to me, and I suspect most useful to all managers, comes from quick, often casual verbal exchanges. This usually reaches a manager much faster than anything written down. And usually the more timely the information, the more valuable it is.
Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned.
There is an especially efficient way to get information, much neglected by most managers. That is to visit a particular place in the company and observe what’s going on there.
transmitting objectives and preferred approaches constitutes a key to successful delegation.
decisions can be separated into two kinds.
forward-looking sort
The 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 people (talking somebody out of quitting).
your decision-making depends finally on how well you comprehend the facts and issues facing your business.
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.
How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader.
to maximize the leverage of his activities, a manager must keep timeliness, which is often critical, firmly in mind.
A manager can also exert high leverage by engaging in an activity that takes him only a short time, but that affects another person’s performance over a long time. A performance review represents a good example of this.
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.
delegation without follow-through is abdication.
if a manager is both a hierarchical supervisor and a supplier of know-how, he should try to have a total of six to eight subordinates or their equivalent.
Process-Oriented Meetings
ONE-ON-ONES
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.
Accordingly, 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.
I feel that a one-on-one should last an hour at a minimum.
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.
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.
The most important criterion governing matters to be talked about is that they be issues that preoccupy and nag the subordinate.
“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.”
One-on-ones should be scheduled on a rolling basis—setting up the next one as the meeting taking place ends. Other commitments can thereby be taken into account and cancellations avoided.
STAFF MEETINGS
What should be discussed at a staff meeting? Anything that affects more than two of the people present.
How structured should the meeting be? A free-for-all brainstorming session or controlled with a detailed agenda? It should be mostly controlled, with an agenda issued far enough in advance that the subordinates will have had the chance to prepare their thoughts for the meeting. But it should also include an “open session”—a designated period of time for the staff to bring up anything they want.
Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff. Decision-making is not a spectator sport, because onlookers get in the way of what needs to be done.
In practice, however, if all goes well, routine meetings will take care of maybe 80 percent of the problems and issues; the remaining 20 percent will still have to be dealt with in mission-oriented meetings. Remember, Peter Drucker said that if people spend more than 25 percent of their time in meetings, it is a sign of malorganization.
In our business we have to mix knowledge-power people with position-power people daily, and together they make decisions that could affect us for years to come. If we don’t link our engineers with our managers in such a way as to get good decisions, we can’t succeed in our industry.
