High Output Management Quotes

“A real time-saver is using a “hold” file where both the supervisor and subordinate accumulate important but not altogether urgent issues for discussion at the next meeting.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“I’d like to suggest some mechanical hints for effective one-on-one meetings. First, both the supervisor and subordinate should have a copy of the outline and both should take notes on it, which serves a number of purposes”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“How is this done? By applying Grove’s Principle of Didactic Management, “Ask one more question!” When the supervisor thinks the subordinate has said all he wants to about a subject, he should ask another question.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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. There’s good reason for this. Somebody needs to prepare for the meeting. The supervisor with eight subordinates would have to prepare eight times; the subordinate only once. So the latter should be asked to prepare an outline, which is very important because it forces him to think through in advance all of the issues and points he plans to raise. Moreover, with an outline, the supervisor knows at the outset what is to be covered and can therefore help to set the pace of the meeting according to the “meatiness” of the items on the agenda.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The key is this: understand that interrupters have legitimate problems that need to be handled. That’s why they’re bringing them to you. But you can channel the time needed to deal with them into organized, scheduled form by providing an alternative to interruption—a scheduled meeting or an office hour. The point is to impose a pattern on the way a manager copes with problems. To make something regular that was once irregular is a fundamental production principle, and that’s how you should try to handle the interruptions that plague you.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Also, if you use the production principle of batching—that is, handling a group of similar chores at one time—many interruptions that come from your subordinates can be accumulated and handled not randomly, but at staff and at one-on-one meetings, the subject of the next chapter. If such meetings are held regularly, people can’t protest too much if they’re asked to batch questions and problems for scheduled times, instead of interrupting you whenever they want.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Manufacturers turn out standard products. By analogy, if you can pin down what kind of interruptions you’re getting, you can prepare standard responses for those that pop up most often.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“But because you must coordinate your work with that of other managers, you can only move toward regularity if others do too. In other words, the same blocks of time must be used for like activities. For example, at Intel Monday mornings have been set aside throughout the corporation as the time when planning groups meet.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“we should try to make our managerial work take on the characteristics of a factory, not a job shop. Accordingly, we should do everything we can to prevent little stops and starts in our day as well as interruptions brought on by big emergencies.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1.  You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2.  You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle. It is important to say “no” earlier rather than later because we’ve learned that to wait until something reaches a higher value stage and then abort due to lack of capacity means losing more money and time.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1.  You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2.  You should say “no” at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Most people use their calendars as a repository of “orders” that come in. Someone throws an order to a manager for his time, and it automatically shows up on his calendar. This is mindless passivity. To gain better control of his time, the manager should use his calendar as a “production” planning tool, taking a firm initiative to schedule work that is not time-critical between those “limiting steps” in the day.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Managerial productivity—that is, the output of a manager per unit of time worked—can be increased in three ways: 1.  Increasing the rate with which a manager performs his activities, speeding up his work. 2.  Increasing the leverage associated with the various managerial activities. 3.  Shifting the mix of a manager’s activities from those with lower to those with higher leverage.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Before you are horrified by how much time I spend in meetings, answer a question: which of the activities—information-gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model—could I have performed outside a meeting? The answer is practically none. Meetings provide an occasion for managerial activities. Getting together with others is not, of course, an activity—it is a medium.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“You often do things at the office designed to influence events slightly, maybe making a phone call to an associate suggesting that a decision be made in a certain way, or sending a note or a memo that shows how you see a particular situation, or making a comment during an oral presentation. In such instances you may be advocating a preferred course of action, but you are not issuing an instruction or a command. Yet you’re doing something stronger than merely conveying information. 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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“information-gathering is the basis of all other managerial work, which is why I choose to spend so much of my day doing it.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Your information sources should complement one another, and also be redundant because that gives you a way to verify what you’ve learned.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“our capital authorization process itself is important, not the authorization itself. To prepare and justify a capital spending request, people go through a lot of soul-searching analysis and juggling, and it is this mental exercise that is valuable. The formal authorization is useful only because it enforces the discipline of the process.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“you need to develop a higher tolerance for disorder. Now, you should still not accept disorder. In fact, you should do your best to drive what’s around you to order.”
― 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. Like a housewife’s, a manager’s work is never done.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“What we actually do is difficult to pin down and sum up. Much of it often seems so inconsequential that our position in the business hardly seems justified. Part of the problem here stems from the distinction between our activities, which is what we actually do, and our output, which is what we achieve. The latter seems important, significant, and worthwhile. The former often seems trivial, insignificant, and messy. But a surgeon whose output is a cured patient spends his time scrubbing and cutting and suturing, and this hardly sounds very respectable either.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“was once asked by a middle manager at Intel how I could teach in-plant courses, visit manufacturing plants, concern myself with the problems of people several levels removed from me in the organization, and still have time to do my job. I asked him what he thought my job was. He thought for a moment, and then answered his own question, “I guess those things are your job too, aren’t they?” They are absolutely my job—not my entire job, but part of it, because they help add to the output of Intel.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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. While the manager’s own work is clearly very important, that in itself does not create output. Her organization does.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“the definition of “manager” should be broadened: 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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Automation is certainly one way to improve the leverage of all types of work. Having machines to help them, human beings can create more output. But in both widget manufacturing and administrative work, something else can also increase the productivity of the black box. This is called work simplification. To get leverage this way, you first need to create a flow chart of the production process as it exists. Every single step must be shown on it; no step should be omitted in order to pretty things up on paper. Second, count the number of steps in the flow chart so that you know how many you started with. Third, set a rough target for reduction of the number of steps.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“a very important way to increase productivity is to arrange the work flow inside our black box so that it will be characterized by high output per activity, which is to say high-leverage activities.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“when we examine managerial productivity, we’ll see that when a manager digs deeply into a specific activity under his jurisdiction, he’s applying the principle of variable inspection. If the manager examined everything his various subordinates did, he would be meddling, which for the most part would be a waste of his time. Even worse, his subordinates would become accustomed to not being responsible for their own work, knowing full well that their supervisor will check everything out closely. The principle of variable inspection applied to managerial work nicely skirts both problems, and, as we shall see, gives us an important tool for improving managerial productivity.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Suitably thought through, intelligent inspection schemes can actually increase the efficiency and productivity of any manufacturing or administrative process”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“While in most instances the decision to accept or reject defective material at a given inspection point is an economic one, one should never let substandard material proceed when its defects could cause a complete failure—a reliability problem—for our customer.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“we should deliberately build a reasonable amount of “slack” into the system. And inventory is the most obvious place for it. Clearly, the more inventory we have, the more change we can cope with and still satisfy orders. But inventory costs money to build and keep, and therefore should be controlled carefully. Ideally, 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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management