Sunday, November 29, 2020

Book Overview: High Output Management

I finally got my act together and read the book High Output Management by Andrew Grove - The legendary ex-chairman and CEO of Intel. 

This is by far the most important book to read for improving the output of your company. The book applies production principles to management. It also provides comprehensive overview of a managers role and how they can improve the output of their own organisation. The main thing I learned from the book was:

Managers Output

A manager’s output = the output of his organisation + the output of the neighbouring organisations under his influence.

A manager's objective is to increase the output of those below and around him. A manager should therefore focus on high-leverage activities that have a multiplicative impact on the overall output of his subordinates and peers.

The book states that, “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.” Hence, to increase the performance of an individual, manager has only two options. 

  • Training 
  • Motivation
To increase motivation, manager needs to understand an individual’s highest level needs. The needs can be mapped to the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Training is the highest leverage activity a manager can do to increase the output of an organisation. 

If a manager spends 12 hours preparing training for 10 team members that increases their output by 1% on average, the result is 200 hours of increased output from the 10 employees (each works about 2000 hours a year). Don’t leave training to outsiders, do it yourself.


A lot of time I have seen people end up with endless meetings with participants having no say in whats going on. This is very wasteful for both employee as well as the company. People's time should be treated as one of the most important asset in any company. Meetings should be purposeful and well-executed. The book categorises the meetings into two main categories. 

  • Process-oriented meetings
  • Mission oriented meetings.
The process oriented meetings include the one-to-one meetings, staff meetings and performance review meetings. 

The book goes to great length to explain the importance of one-to-one meetings. They are not only a fundamental element in the manager/employee relationship, but also act as the best source for organisational knowledge that a manager can get. 

Performance reviews are easily mistaken as simply a way to assess performance and evaluate compensation. The fundamental goal of a performance review is to improve the subordinates performance. The performance review is intended to influence a subordinate's performance, this makes this activity one of the manager's highest-leverage activities. Great care needs to be taken in the preparation and delivery of a performance review.

The mission oriented meetings are created on an ad-hoc basis to take a decision. These type of meetings should be lesser than 25% of the total meetings. The meeting attendees should be well prepared and all people vital to taking the decision should be part of the meeting.


Last point I want to mention from the book is about making a decision.

Managers technical knowledge will become dated over time, so decision-making in a technical, information-driven environment needs to be a process that takes into the account both people with knowledge-power and people with position-power. 

People with knowledge-power have the knowhow of how the technology works, they understand the technology better. People with position-power are the ones who are responsible for actually taking the decision.

To make any decision all of the below mentioned questions should be answered in advanced:

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?

The book offers so much guidance, I recommend reading the book multiple times to actually digest and implement the advices fully.

Have some Fun!