High Output Management

High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

The One Sentence That Changes Everything

Most managers, if you ask them what they actually produce, will give you a list of verbs. They make decisions. They allocate resources. They attend meetings, write reports, coach people, negotiate deals. Andrew Grove heard all of these answers when he asked middle managers to define their output, and he found them all wrong. Those are activities, not output. A surgeon spends the day scrubbing, cutting, and suturing, but the output is a healed patient. The activity is not the point.

Grove ran Intel through one of the hardest corporate transformations in history, walking away from the memory business it had invented and betting the company on microprocessors. He had emigrated from Hungary in his twenties with no money and barely any English, earned a PhD at Berkeley, and helped build what became the largest semiconductor maker on earth. And the lesson he wanted to pass on was almost insultingly simple. He put it in one sentence and called it the single most important idea in the book.

The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his supervision or influence.

Sit with that. Your output is not what you do. It is what your team does, plus what the teams next to you do because of your influence. A wafer plant manager's output is finished, high-quality silicon, even though he never touches a wafer. A school principal's output is educated students ready to advance. If you grasp this fully, the whole job rearranges itself in front of you. The question stops being "How much work did I get through today?" and becomes "How much did the people around me produce, and how much of that traces back to me?"