High Output Management Quotes

“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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Remember that by saying “yes”—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: 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 the answer is no, he is not capable.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“We must recognize that no amount of formal planning can anticipate changes such as globalization and the information revolution we’ve referred to above. Does that mean that you shouldn’t plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“[..] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off. But what is really being influenced here? It is the next year—and only the next year.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“you have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee—you are in a business with one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses. There are millions of others all over the world, picking up the pace, capable of doing the same work that you can do and perhaps more eager to do it. Now, you may be tempted to look around your workplace and point to your fellow workers as rivals, but they are not. They are outnumbered—a thousand to one, one hundred thousand to one, a million to one—by people who work for organizations that compete with your firm. So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Once someone’s source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Thus, its most important characteristic is that unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The value system at Intel is completely the reverse. The Ph.D. in computer science who knows an answer in the abstract, yet does not apply it to create some tangible output, gets little recognition, but a junior engineer who produces results is highly valued and esteemed. And that is how it should be.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“delegation without follow-through is abdication.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“we confused the manager’s general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Eliciting peak performance means going up against something or somebody. Let me give you a simple example. For years the performance of the Intel facilities maintenance group, which is responsible for keeping our buildings clean and neat, was mediocre, and no amount of pressure or inducement seemed to do any good. We then initiated a program in which each building’s upkeep was periodically scored by a resident senior manager, dubbed a “building czar.” The score was then compared with those given the other buildings. The condition of all of them dramatically improved almost immediately. Nothing else was done; people did not get more money or other rewards. What they did get was a racetrack, an arena of competition. If your work is facilities maintenance, having your building receive the top score is a powerful source of motivation. This is key to the manager’s approach and involvement: he has to see the work as it is seen by the people who do that work every day and then create indicators so that his subordinates can watch their “racetrack” take shape.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“your task is to find the most cost-effective way to deploy your resources—the key to optimizing all types of productive work. Bear in mind that in this and in other such situations there is a right answer, the one that can give you the best delivery time and product quality at the lowest possible cost.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“A poor performer has a strong tendency to ignore his problem.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk or memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management