1983 HighOutputManagement

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Subject Headings: Objectives and Key Results, (Grove, 1983) Chatbot.

Notes

Cited By

References

2024

Quotes

  • “Remember too that your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.”
  • “The absolute truth is that if you don’t know what you want, you won’t get it.”
  • “Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”
  • “But in the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled.”
  • “Here I’d like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.”
  • “My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.”
  • “Remember that by saying “yes”—to projects, a course of action, or whatever—you are implicitly saying “no” to something else.”
  • “We must recognize that no amount of formal planning can anticipate changes such as globalization and the information revolution. You need to plan the way a fire department plans.”
  • “Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.”
  • “When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated. To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.”
  • “Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.”
  • “[..] in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.”
  • “The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make him a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman. Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.”
  • “To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.”
  • “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.”
  • “At Intel, we put ourselves through an annual strategic long-range planning effort in which we examine our future five years off. But what is really being influenced here? It is the next year—and only the next year.”
  • “The value system at Intel is completely the reverse. The Ph.D. in computer science who knows an answer in the abstract, yet does not apply it to create some tangible output, gets little recognition, but a junior engineer who produces results is highly valued and esteemed. And that is how it should be.”
  • “Delegation without follow-through is abdication.”
  • “The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his or her supervision or influence.”
  • “You have to accept that no matter where you work, you are not an employee—you are in a business with one employee: yourself. You are in competition with millions of similar businesses. There are millions of others all over the world, picking up the pace, capable of doing the same work that you can do and perhaps more eager to do it. Now, you may be tempted to look around your workplace and point to your fellow workers as rivals, but they are not. They are outnumbered—a thousand to one, one hundred thousand to one, a million to one—by people who work for organizations that compete with your firm. So if you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage.”
  • “Are you trying new ideas, new techniques, and new technologies, and I mean personally trying them, not just reading about them? Or are you waiting for others to figure out how they can re-engineer your workplace—and you out of that workplace?”
  • “We confused the manager’s general competence and maturity with his task-relevant maturity.”
  • “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.”
  • “Eliciting peak performance means going up against something or somebody. Let me give you a simple example. For years the performance of the Intel facilities maintenance group, which is responsible for keeping our buildings clean and neat, was mediocre, and no amount of pressure or inducement seemed to do any good. We then initiated a program in which each building’s upkeep was periodically scored by a resident senior manager, dubbed a building czar. The score was then compared with those given the other buildings. The condition of all of them dramatically improved almost immediately. Nothing else was done; people did not get more money or other rewards. What they did get was a racetrack, an arena of competition. If your work is facilities maintenance, having your building receive the top score is a powerful source of motivation. This is key to the manager’s approach and involvement: he has to see the work as it is seen by the people who do that work every day and then create indicators so that his subordinates can watch their “racetrack” take shape.”
  • “The key to survival is to learn to add more value—and”
  • “The single most important task of a manager is to elicit peak performance from his subordinates. So if two things limit high output, a manager has two ways to tackle the issue: through training and motivation.”
  • “High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.”
  • “A big part of a middle manager’s work is to supply information and know-how, and to impart a sense of the preferred method of handling things to the groups under his control and influence. A manager also makes and helps to make decisions. Both kinds of basic managerial tasks can only occur during face-to-face encounters, and therefore only during meetings. Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.”
  • “Adapt or die.”
  • “All production flows have a basic characteristic: the material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process.”

Table of Contents:

Part I. The breakfast factory.

The basics of production : delivering a breakfast (or a college graduate, or a compiler, or a convicted criminal ...)

Managing the breakfast factory

Part II. Management is a team game.

Managerial leverage

Chatper 4. Meetings : the medium of managerial work

Chatper 5. Decisions, Decisions

Planning: Today’s Actions for Tomorrow’s Output =

Team of Teams

The Breakfast Factory Goes National =

Hybrid Organizations =

Dual Reporting =

Modes of control

Part IV. The players.

The sports analogy

Task-relevant maturity

Performance appraisal

manager as judge and jury

Two difficult tasks

Compensation as task-relevant feedback

Why training is the boss's job.

References

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 AuthorvolumeDate ValuetitletypejournaltitleUrldoinoteyear
1983 HighOutputManagementAndrew Grove (1936-2016)High Output Management1983
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