High Output Management

16 Sep 2021

Book	High Output Management
Author	Andrew Grove

Quotes

Teams and Leverage

High output work fundamentally depends on teams. And the output of a team depends on the effectiveness of the team manager, in the sense that they can influence them to increase output.

The second idea is that the work of a business, of a govemment bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not by individuals but by teams. This idea is summed up in what I regard as the single most important sentence of this book: The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or 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. While the manager’s own work is clearly very important, that in itself does not create output. Her organization does. By analogy, a coach or a quarterback alone does not score touchdowns and win games. Entire teams with their participation and guidance and direction do. League standings are kept by team, not by individual. Business–and this means not just the business of commerce but the business of education, the business of government, the business of medicine–is a team activity. And, always, it takes a team to win.

It is important to understand that a manager will find himself engaging in an array of activities in order to affect output. As the middle managers I queried said, 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.

Leverage is the measure of a manager’s impact that is produced by their team.

The question then becomes, what can or managers do to increase the output of their teams? Put another way, what specifically should they be doing during the day when a virtually limitless number of possible tasks calls for their attention? To give you a way to answer this question, I introduce the concept of leverage, which measures the impact of what managers do to increase the output of their teams. High output teams depend largely on managerial productivity and on high leverage.

Production Flows

“Production flows” (or value chains) are process that increase value from left to right, input to output.

All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process. A boiled egg is more valuable than a raw one, fully assembled breakfast is more valuable than its constituent parts, and finally, the breakfast placed in front of the customer is more valuable still.

It’s important to fix problems as upstream as possible in any production flow or value chain.

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. Thus, we should find and reject the rotten egg as it’s being delivered from our supplier rather than permitting the customer to find it. Likewise, if we can decide that we don’t want a college candidate at the time of the campus interview rather than during the course of a plant visit, we save the cost of the trip and the time of both the candidate and the interviewers. And we should also try to find any performance problem at the time of the unit test of the pieces that make up a compiler rather than in the course of the test of the final product itself.

Communication

Don’t care about sounding dumb. Speak up.

One thing that paralyzes both knowledge and position power possessors is the fear of simply sounding dumb. For the senior person, this is likely to keep him from asking the questions he should ask. The same fear will make other participants merely think their thoughts privately rather than articulate them for all to hear; at best they will whisper what they have to say to a neighbor. As a manager, you should remind yourself that each time an insight or fact is withheld and an appropriate question is suppressed, the decision-making process is less good than it might have been.

Notes

Output is the clear, hard, physical and quantifiable things we produce.

This book is the bible for how to increase output of a team and individuals that manage teams.

All of the outputs we produce should be oriented towards some positive high-level/ strategic outcome for the company.

“Impatient with outputs, patient with outcomes.”