High Output Management

Highlights

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

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

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• 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.

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• Note: Also true of web projects and marketing client relationships.

• Andy presents a great example of this: “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.”

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• I was once asked by a middle manager at Intel how I could teach in-plant courses, visit manufacturing plants, concern myself with the problems of people several levels removed from me in the organization, and still have time to do my job. I asked him what he thought my job was. He thought for a moment, and then answered his own question, “I guess those things are your job too, aren’t they?” They are absolutely my job—not my entire job, but part of it, because they help add to the output of Intel.

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• My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done.

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• Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information. Writing the report is important; reading it often is not.

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• How you handle your own time is, in my view, the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader.

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• If Robin has to scramble later to help a manager define guidelines and milestones, her work will clearly have much less leverage.

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• Note: This feels like it applies to giving good briefs to campaign managers.

• You can never wash your hands of a task. Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result.

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• Another production principle is very nearly the opposite. A manager should carry a raw material inventory in terms of projects. This is not to be confused with his work-in-process inventory, because that, like eggs in a continuous boiler, tends to spoil or become obsolete over time. Instead this inventory should consist of things you need to do but don’t need to finish right away—discretionary projects, the kind the manager can work on to increase his group’s productivity over the long term. Without such an inventory of projects, a manager will most probably use his free time meddling in his subordinates’ work.

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• Also, if you use the production principle of batching—that is, handling a group of similar chores at one time—many interruptions that come from your subordinates can be accumulated and handled not randomly, but at staff and at one-on-one meetings, the subject of the next chapter. If such meetings are held regularly, people can’t protest too much if they’re asked to batch questions and problems for scheduled times, instead of interrupting you whenever they want.

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• Note: Ties into Cal Newport's idea of having a morning and an afternoon stand-up for 10 mins each day.

• The key is this: understand that interrupters have legitimate problems that need to be handled. That’s why they’re bringing them to you. But you can channel the time needed to deal with them into organized, scheduled form by providing an alternative to interruption—a scheduled meeting or an office hour. The point is to impose a pattern on the way a manager copes with problems. To make something regular that was once irregular is a fundamental production principle, and that’s how you should try to handle the interruptions that plague you.

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• 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.

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• A key point about a one-on-one: It should be regarded as the subordinate’s meeting, with its agenda and tone set by him. There’s good reason for this. Somebody needs to prepare for the meeting. The supervisor with eight subordinates would have to prepare eight times; the subordinate only once. So the latter should be asked to prepare an outline, which is very important because it forces him to think through in advance all of the issues and points he plans to raise. Moreover, with an outline, the supervisor knows at the outset what is to be covered and can therefore help to set the pace of the meeting according to the “meatiness” of the items on the agenda.

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• As a rule of thumb, I would recommend four minutes of presentation and discussion time per visual aid, which can include tables, numbers, or graphics.

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• Remember, Peter Drucker said that if people spend more than 25 percent of their time in meetings, it is a sign of malorganization. I would put it another way: the real sign of malorganization is when people spend more than 25 percent of their time in ad hoc mission-oriented meetings.

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• I have seen far too many people who upon recognizing today’s gap try very hard to determine what decision has to be made to close it. But today’s gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past. By analogy, forcing ourselves to concentrate on the decisions needed to fix today’s problem is like scurrying after our car has already run out of gas. Clearly we should have filled up earlier.

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• 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.

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• The physiological, safety/security, and social needs all can motivate us to show up for work, but other needs—esteem and self-actualization—make us perform once we are there.

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• In an MBO system, for example, objectives should be set at a point high enough so that even if the individual (or organization) pushes himself hard, he will still only have a fifty-fifty chance of making them. Output will tend to be greater when everybody strives for a level of achievement beyond his immediate grasp, even though trying means failure half the time. Such goal-setting is extremely important if what you want is peak performance from yourself and your subordinates.

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• That makes the cliché apply: if you can’t beat them, join them—endow work with the characteristics of competitive sports. And the best way to get that spirit into the workplace is to establish some rules of the game and ways for employees to measure themselves. Eliciting peak performance means going up against something or somebody.

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• An associate of mine who had always done an outstanding job hired a junior person to handle some old tasks, while he himself took on some new ones. 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. The responsibility for teaching the subordinate must be assumed by his supervisor, and not paid for by the customers of his organization, internal or external.

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• Everyone must decide for himself what is professional and appropriate here. A test might be to imagine yourself delivering a tough performance review to your friend. Do you cringe at the thought? If so, don’t make friends at work. If your stomach remains unaffected, you are likely to be someone whose personal relationships will strengthen work relationships.

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• But what is its fundamental purpose? Though all of the responses given to my questions are correct, there is one that is more important than any of the others: it is to improve the subordinate’s performance.

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• Note: In regards to performance reviews.

• The output indicators merely represented work done years ago—the light from distant stars, as it were—which was still holding up.

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• I think we have our priorities reversed. Shouldn’t we spend more time trying to improve the performance of our stars? After all, these people account for a disproportionately large share of the work in any organization. Put another way, concentrating on the stars is a high-leverage activity: if they get better, the impact on group output is very great indeed.

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• Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours of preparation for each hour of course time—twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.

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