High Output Management QUOTES

121 " 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

122 " High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

123 " Thus, 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

124 " 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

125 " 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

126 " Andy replied with an answer that I did not expect: “CEOs always act on leading indicators of good news, but only act on lagging indicators of bad news.” “Why?” I asked him. He answered in the style resonant of his entire book: “In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you are trying to do something that most people would consider impossible. Optimists most certainly do not listen to leading indicators of bad news. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

127 " 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

128 " 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

129 " In other words, one of the manager’s key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance: • What decision needs to be made? • When does it have to be made? • Who will decide? • Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision? • Who will ratify or veto the decision? • Who will need to be informed of the decision? "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

130 " a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

131 " Let’s look at how the questions above fit into the four categories. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

132 " The two basic managerial roles produce two basic kinds of meetings. In the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged. Such meetings take place on a regularly scheduled basis. The purpose of the second kind of meeting is to solve a specific problem. Meetings of this sort, called mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision. They are ad hoc affairs, not scheduled long in advance, because they usually can’t be. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

133 " 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

134 " Globalization simply means that business knows no national boundaries. Capital and work—your work and your counterparts’ work—can go anywhere on earth and do a job. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

135 " 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

136 " 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

137 " For Maslow, motivation is closely tied to the idea of needs, which cause people to have drives, which in turn result in motivation. A need once satisfied stops being a need and therefore stops being a source of motivation. Simply put, if we are to create and maintain a high degree of motivation, we must keep some needs unsatisfied at all times. "

― Andrew S. Grove , High Output Management

138 " 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

139 " what self-actualization means: the need to achieve one’s utter personal best in a chosen field of endeavor. 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

140 " 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