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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.
In a slow or no-growth environment, there is another factor that you have to contend with as well: ambitious junior employees who desire to move upward in the organization. They may very well be ready to do so but can’t because you’re in the way.
nobody owes you a career. 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.
1. Are you adding real value or merely passing information along?
2. 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.
3. Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them?
“CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.”
“In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news.”
The development of a “compiler,” a major piece of computer software, also demonstrates process, assembly, and test.
To find that right answer, you must develop a clear understanding of the trade-offs between the various factors—manpower, capacity, and inventory
How do you minimize the risk of a breakdown of this sort? Performing a functional test is one way. From time to time you open an egg as it comes out of the machine and check its quality. But you will have to throw away the egg tested. A second way involves in-process inspection, which can take many forms. You could, for example, simply insert a thermometer into the water so that the temperature could be easily and frequently checked. To avoid having to pay someone to read the thermometer, you could connect an electronic gadget to it that would set off bells anytime the temperature varied by a
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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.
But to run your operation well, you will need a set of good indicators, or measurements.
the variance between your plan and the actual delivery of breakfasts for the preceding day.
raw material inventory.
condition of your equipment.
your manpower.
quality indicator.
But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.
a good indicator is that what you measure should be a physical, countable thing.
Controlling Future Output
Some industries build to order. For example, when you go shopping for a sofa, you are going to have to wait a long time
build to forecast, which is a contemplation of future orders.
obvious disadvantage here is that the manufacturer takes an inventory risk.
inventory should be kept at the lowest-value stage, as we’ve learned before, like raw eggs kept at the breakfast factory. Also, the lower the value, the more production flexibility we obtain for a given inventory cost.
Assuring Quality
To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level.
Let’s consider a few techniques commonly used to balance the two needs. There is a gate-like inspection and a monitoring step.
Productivity
The productivity of any function occurring within it is the output divided by the labor required to generate the output.
leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity.
A manager’s output = The output of his organization + The output of the neighboring organizations under his influence
the key definition here is that the output of a manager is a result achieved by a group either under her supervision or under her influence.
A Day from My Life
(information-gathering),
Encouraged him to talk to certain other managers about a career change (nudge), and decided to pursue this matter with them myself (decision-making).
My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done. Like a housewife’s, a manager’s work is never done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.
he should move to the point where his leverage will be the greatest.
I have to confess that the information most useful to me, and I suspect most useful to all managers, comes from quick, often casual verbal exchanges.
Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.
To improve and maintain your capacity to get information, you have to understand the way it comes to you.
Verbal sources are the most valuable, but what they provide is also sketchy,
Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned.
visit a particular place in the company and observe what’s going on there.
a manager must also communicate his objectives, priorities, and preferences as they bear on the way certain tasks are approached.
The third major kind of managerial activity, of course, is decision-making. To be sure, once in a while we managers in fact make a decision. But for every time that happens, we participate in the making of many, many others, and we do that in a variety of ways. We provide factual inputs or just offer opinions, we debate the pros and cons of alternatives and thereby force a better decision to emerge, we review decisions made or about to be made by others, encourage or discourage them, ratify or veto them.
Other activities—conveying information, making decisions, and being a role model for your subordinates—are all governed by the base of information that you, the manager, have about the tasks, the issues, the needs, and the problems facing your organization. In short, information-gathering is the basis of all other managerial work,
Let’s call it “nudging” because through it you nudge an individual or a meeting in the direction you would like. This is an immensely important managerial activity in which we engage all the time, and it should be carefully distinguished from decision-making that results in firm, clear directives. In reality, for every unambiguous decision we make, we probably nudge things a dozen times.
