This is Part 1 of a series inspired by Andy Grove's monumental business book, High Output Management. This series is designed for busy leaders seeking an edge on their day. Based on your feedback, we'll be breaking down Groves's 227 power-packed pages into 50-page summaries presented in actionable note format.
Notes from the first 50 pages of High Output Management
We'll start with a few quotes to get the motor running:
"Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos." I don't even know what this quote means, but it somehow imparts a zen-like acceptance of business craziness with calm control.
"The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence." — Andy highlights this as the most important sentence in the book
"Activity is what we actually do and often seems trivial. Output is what we achieve and is significant and worthwhile."
"In the softer professions it becomes very hard to distinguish between activity and output. Aim to maximize output. Optimizing for activity can actually decrease productivity.
"Output and activity are by no means the same thing."
Andy is a big proponent of increasing managerial "leverage", i.e. focusing on activities with a multiplicative impact on your team's output. Andy later challenges the reader (the former President of Intel challenges YOU) with 13 opportunities to take action on increasing their managerial leverage.
Here are the best five:
Define the three most important objectives for your organization for the next three months. Support them with key results. (For tech readers: yes, this is where OKRs originated from)
Look at your calendar for the last two weeks. Classify your activities as LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH leverage. Generate a plan of action to do more of the HIGH-leverage category. Identify two activities you will commit to reduce.
Define your output. What are the output elements of the organization you manage and influence? List them in order of importance.
Conduct work simplification (reduction of steps) on your most tedious, time-consuming task. Eliminate at least 30 percent of the total number of steps involved.
Walk around more. Andy was a big believer in taking "tours" of other teams and facilities to absorb their process, habits and challenges. Similar to Steve Jobs, Andy seems to value serendipitous encounters which help encourage the flow of information.
Other select notes:
p. 14 - think of your work as production measured by throughput / output. What is your "limiting step" [dependency]? What is your "in-process check" [QA]?
p. 17 - for each indicator try to have a "pairing indicator" to measure both effect and counter effect, especially for administrative work, e.g. quantity AND quality
p. 24 - "the most valuable indicator of business trends that I've ever seen is a month-over-month 4-month stagger chart forecast [pictured below]
p. 28 - don't forget Parkinson's famous law that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
p. 35 - "work simplification" entails reducing the number of steps in a given process, usually by 30-50% based on Andy's experience
p. 48 - writing reports may seem mundane, but are often an exercise—or medium—of self-discipline; the process enforces discipline, and the writing is often more important than reading them
p.49 - Grove advocates ad hoc in-person meetings as the most effective method to conduct managerial business
p. 50 - beyond communicating facts, a manager must relay his objectives, preferences, and priorities which is an extremely important and key part of delegation
Here's that 4-month stagger forecast that was mentioned on page 24:
In closing, its worth mentioning that Andy Grove applied many of Abraham Maslow's psychological concepts within the work environment. For that reason we've included the now-famous hierarchy of needs applied to employee engagement.
How would you evaluate your team?