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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.
A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.
“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.”
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.
the improvement or deterioration of the forecasted outlook from one month to the next provides the most valuable indicator of business trends that I have ever seen.
There is no question that having standards and believing in them and staffing an administrative unit objectively using forecasted workloads will help you to maintain and enhance productivity.
one should never let substandard material proceed when its defects could cause a complete failure—a reliability problem—for our customer.
The productivity of any function occurring within it is the output divided by the labor required to generate the output.
stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.
a manager must form opinions and make judgments, he must provide direction, he must allocate resources, he must detect mistakes, and so on. All these are necessary to achieve output. But output and activity are by no means the same thing.
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 will be the greatest.
Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
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.
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.
Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.
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. (Two days a week per subordinate would probably lead to meddling; an hour a week does not provide enough opportunity for monitoring.)
Peter Drucker sums up the supervisor’s job here very nicely: “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.”
No matter how much time we may spend trying to forge agreement, we just won’t be able to get it on many issues. 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. All a manager can expect is that the commitment to support is honestly present, and this is something he can and must get from everyone.
“Group decisions do not always come easily. There is a strong temptation for the leading officers to make decisions themselves without the sometimes onerous process of discussion.”
Alfred Sloan
today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past. By analogy, forcing ourselves to concentrate on the decisions needed to fix today’s problem is like scurrying after our car has already run out of gas. Clearly we should have filled up earlier.
Who should be involved in the planning process? The operating management of the organization. Why? Because the idea that planners can be people apart from those implementing the plan simply does not work.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.”
“Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization.”
Alfred Sloan
Grove’s Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.
The free market can easily establish a price for something as simple as tires. But for much else that changes hands in a work or business environment, value is hard to establish.
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.
A need once satisfied stops being a need and therefore stops being a source of motivation. Simply put, if we are to create and maintain a high degree of motivation, we must keep some needs unsatisfied at all times.
All of the sources of motivation we’ve talked about so far are self-limiting. That is, when a need is gratified, it can no longer motivate a person. Once a predetermined goal or level of achievement is reached, the need to go any further loses urgency.
The role of the manager here is also clear: it is that of the coach. First, an ideal coach takes no personal credit for the success of his team, and because of that his players trust him. Second, he is tough on his team. By being critical, he tries to get the best performance his team members can provide. Third, a good coach was likely a good player himself at one time. And having played the game well, he also understands it well.
There is a huge distinction between a social relationship and a communicating management style, which is a caring involvement in the work of the subordinate. Close relationships off the job may help to create an equivalent relationship on the job, but they should not be confused.
Reviewing the performance of subordinates is a formal act of leadership. If supervisors permit themselves to be prompted in one way or another, their leadership and their capacity for it will begin to appear false.
Usually the person who was promoted beyond his capability is forced to leave the company rather than encouraged to take a step back. This is often rationalized by the notion that “It is better that we let him go, for his own sake.”
manager’s output is the output of his organization—no more, no less.
Training must be done by a person who represents a suitable role model. Proxies, no matter how well versed they might be in the subject matter, cannot assume that role.
