High Output Management Quotes

“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

“Now, I’m sure that at various times you will take exception to what you read in this book. “This may be fine at Intel,” you will say, “but it would never fly at PDQ, where I work. Nothing does until the Old Man himself decrees it. Short of a palace revolution, I can’t use anything you recommend.” Let me assure you that you will be able to use most of what I say. As a middle manager, of any sort, you are in effect a chief executive of an organization yourself. Don’t wait for the principles and practices you find appealing to be imposed from the top. As a micro CEO, you can improve your own and your group’s performance and productivity, whether or not the rest of the company follows suit.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“When products and services become largely indistinguishable from each other, all there is by the way of competitive advantage is time. And that’s where the second critical development of the eighties comes in—e-mail.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“If you only understand one thing about building products, you must understand that energy put in early in the process pays off tenfold and energy put in at the end of the program pays off negative tenfold.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it. This”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today’s gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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

“What should be covered in a one-on-one? We can start with performance figures, indicators used by the subordinate, such as incoming order rates, production output, or project status. Emphasis should be on indicators that signal trouble. The meeting should also cover anything 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. Even when a problem isn’t tangible, even if it’s only an intuition that something’s wrong, a subordinate owes it to his supervisor to tell him, because it triggers a look into the organizational black box. The most important criterion governing matters to be talked about is that they be issues that preoccupy and nag the subordinate. These are often obscure and take time to surface, consider, and resolve.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“What is the role of the supervisor in a one-on-one? He should facilitate the subordinate’s expression of what’s going on and what’s bothering him. The supervisor is there to learn and to coach. 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.” How is this done? By applying Grove’s Principle of Didactic Management, “Ask one more 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. An outline also provides a framework for supporting information, which the subordinate should prepare in advance. The subordinate should then walk the supervisor through all the material.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Everyone must decide for himself what is professional and appropriate here. A test might be to imagine yourself delivering a tough performance review to your friend. Do you cringe at the thought? If so, don’t make friends at work. If your stomach remains unaffected, you are likely to be someone whose personal relationships will strengthen work relationships.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

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

“What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting—a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“What is the role of the supervisor in the staff meeting—a leader, observer, expediter, questioner, decision-maker? The answer, of course, is all of them. Please note that lecturer is not listed. A”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The subordinate did poor work. My associate’s reaction: ‘He has to make his own mistakes. That’s how he learns!’ The problem with this is that the subordinate’s tuition is paid by his customers. And that is absolutely wrong.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Insufficiently trained employees, in spite of their best intentions, produce inefficiencies, excess costs, unhappy customers, and sometimes even dangerous situations. The importance of training rapidly becomes obvious to the manager who runs into these problems.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Once responsibility has been assumed, however, finding the solution is relatively easy. This is because the move from blaming others to assuming responsibility constitutes an emotional step, while the move from assuming responsibility to finding the solution is an intellectual one, and the latter is easier.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Turning the workplace into a playing field can turn our subordinates into “athletes” dedicated to performing at the limit of their capabilities—the key to making our team consistent winners.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The achievement-driven path to self-actualization is not quite like this. Some people—not the majority—are moved by an abstract need to achieve in all that they do. A psychology lab experiment illustrated the behavior of such people. Some volunteers were put into a room in which pegs were set at various places on the floor. Each person was given some rings but not instructed what to do with them. People eventually started to toss the rings onto the pegs. Some casually tossed the rings at faraway pegs; others stood over the pegs and dropped the rings down onto them. Still others walked just far enough away from the pegs so that to toss a ring onto a peg constituted a challenge. These people worked at the boundary of their capability.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“I think, by applying our production principles. First, we must identify our limiting step: what is the “egg” in our work?”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Accordingly, managerial output can be linked to managerial activity by the equation: Managerial Output = Output of organization   = L1 × A1 + L2 × A2 +… This equation says that for every activity a manager performs—A1, A2, and so on—the output of the organization should increase by some degree. The extent to which that output is thereby increased is determined by the leverage of that activity—L1, L2, and so on. A manager’s output is thus the sum of the result of individual activities having varying degrees of leverage. Clearly the key to high output means being sensitive to the leverage of what you do during the day. 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. Let us consider first the leverage of various types of managerial work. HIGH-LEVERAGE ACTIVITIES These can be achieved in three basic ways: •  When many people are affected by one manager. •  When a person’s activity or behavior over a long period of time is affected by a manager’s brief, well-focused set of words or actions. •  When a large group’s work is affected by an individual supplying a unique, key piece of”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“But be sure to know exactly what you’re doing, and avoid the charade of insincere delegation, which can produce immense negative managerial leverage.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“The “delegator” and “delegatee” must share a common information base and a common set of operational ideas or notions on how to go about solving problems, a”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Take another example. An Intel development engineer who has uniquely detailed knowledge of a particular manufacturing process effectively controls how it is used. Since the process will eventually provide the foundation for the work of many product designers all over the company, the leverage the development engineer exerts is enormous. The same is true for a geologist in an oil company or an actuary in an insurance firm. All are specialists whose work is important for the work of their organization at large. The person who comprehends the critical facts or has the critical insights—the “knowledge specialist” or the “know-how manager”—has tremendous authority and influence on the work of others, and therefore very high leverage. 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. For me, paying close attention to customer complaints constitutes a high-leverage activity. Aside from making a customer happy, the pursuit tends to produce important insights into the workings of my own operation. Such complaints may be numerous, and though all of them need to be followed up by someone, they don’t all require or wouldn’t all benefit from my personal attention. Which one out of ten or twenty complaints to dig into, analyze, and follow up is where art comes into the work of a manager. The basis of that art is an intuition that behind this complaint and not the other lurk many deeper problems.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“We now discover that management is not just a team game, it is a game in which we have to fashion a team of teams, where the various individual teams exist in some suitable and mutually supportive relationship with each other.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“In other words, the output of the planning process is the decisions made and the actions taken as a result of the process.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“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. In the first round of work simplification, our experience shows that you can reasonably expect a 30 to 50 percent reduction.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“Because the art and science of forecasting is so complex, you might be tempted to give all forecasting responsibility to a single manager who can be made accountable for it. But this usually does not work very well. 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.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“What is important is the thinking you force yourself to go through to understand the relationship between the various aspects of your production process.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management

“alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then balanced against delivery time.”
― Andrew S. Grove, High Output Management