Brief Review: “High Output Management”

“High Output Management”, by Intel co-founder and former CEO Andy Grove, is a management classic and must-read for experienced leaders and managers as well as for those just starting to explore and learn the art/science of managing other people.

The book is written in a straightforward fashion almost like Andy is speaking and teaching to you directly. The book is action packed with information ranging from OKRs, importance of meetings, decision making, dual/matrix reporting, performance reviews, and more. Since there are a number of good summaries of the book (a few of which I’ve included below) I decided to share a few highlights of the book that I particularly enjoyed and found unique:

Importance of managerial work. Engineers, as characterized by the comic Dilbert, often find managers as pointy-haired bureaucrats who don’t understand the issues of the organize and cause more problems them help. Andy, himself a scientist and engineer, explains in great detail the importance of managerial leverage. A small amount of time from a manager to provide clarity of vision, purpose, and context to make decisions can have tremendous output and impact in an employees work.

Meetings are a medium of work. Again, another Dilbert favorite, are the otherwise accepted fact that meetings are a waste of time and take away from work. Andy makes it clear that meetings are indeed work. They are the place where high-level information can be shared, decisions can be made, and the manager can exercise her leverage for employees. Andy goes through great examples about this in his book. He was clear that its important to maximize value and minimize time wasting by taking on the necessary preparation and ensuring meetings have a clear purposes and limited number of participants.

Performance Reviews. Continuing the theme of management leverage — performance reviews are an incredible tool where the manager can give formal feedback to an employee and improve performance — very much like a coach with a star performer. Andy says there is often no better way to spend managerial time and increase managerial leverage than a 1–1 meeting. There were many gems in this chapter but a few tips that he gave stood out:

• Focus on performance. The goal of the review is to drive performance not give a comprehensive assessment and be a verbal dumping ground for you to state everything you know and would like to improve about the employee. Have a few take-aways you’d like to make sure you leave the meeting with.
• Write it down. Writing down what you hear and learn from a performance review is essentially a commitment to do something about it — and you can follow-up on it at the next meeting. This advice was for manager but I’d submit that its good advice for employee as well.

Shaping the field. The book describes that an employee’s performance can only be improved through training and increasing motivation. When I first read that I thought to myself that you can’t actually increase an employee’s motivation. But as I read further I understand clearly something that I also have found effective in organizations I’ve been in and that its about “right-sizing” the opportunity and communicating the value of the work in a way that the employee understands best and fulfills them the most. Dan Pink’s book Drive — goes into this concept in more detail. I fully agree with this concept and its necessary for the manager to be attuned with an employee’s motivational needs and how best to reshape their work and articulation of the opportunity ahead of them in a way that helps maximize their inherent motivation.

Manage teams by through expectation setting and cultural values. The book does a nice job segmenting work by Complexity, Uncertainty, and Ambiguity (CUA): Those jobs with a low degree of CUA can be managed through expectation setting — clear job descriptions, clear activity and metric expectations, etc. Those jobs with a high amount of CUA cannot be managed so concretely and need to be managed through cultural values — explicitly and implicitly communicating what’s important. This is great advice for startup entrepreneurs and why its often hard to hire an employee who only has success in low CUA big company environments.

All in all, High Output Management was amongst the best business / managerial books I’ve read and I’d highly recommend it for business and non-profit managers and leaders in all sectors.

Here are some excellent summaries of the book::

• Top Takeaways — chapter by chapter summary
• Book Notes
• Blog by VC investor Ben Horowitz
• Top 10 Quotes