High Output Look Back

Posted on 17-10-2021

After seeing Andrew Grove's book, High Output Management, mentioned for the umpteenth time I figured I would give it a read. My goal for writing this post is to try and engage a little bit more with the book's content. I am also making an attempt at forming my own opinion about it.

The book is divided in four different parts. It starts out really showing Grove's background in manufacturing. A lot of the principles mentioned are easily applicable to making a lot of a thing at a very low price. It is more challenging to apply the principles in this part to a service oriented industry. However, there are two concepts that caught my eye and I wanted to share them.

The first concept that I thought was interesting is related to how each process involved in manipulating a product or service adds value to the final product. It is important to catch problems early in the process, Grove calls this lowest-value stage, in order to reduce the total value of the mistake. It's interesting to relate this to processes I encounter in my professional life and figure out where to catch potential issues.

In the second chapter Grove mainly goes into using metrics to make predictions. Most of this is, in my opinion, more useful for manufacturing related tasks. However, there is one aspect that I thought was relatable and stood out. He mentions how most processes we encounter as managers are very opaque. Grove draws an interesting analogy to a black box. We see inputs and often have little insight into how the outputs come to be. We cannot micro manage every task and get too lost in the details. This in itself is not very interesting. What makes it interesting is that he supplies techniques that create windows into the black box.

Chapter three is named after the most interesting aspect of the second part of the book: managerial leverage. I found it insightful how your actions as a manager should be focused on activities that have the largest impact on an organisation. As a manager you have to accept that you can't control every little detail, you have to delegate. Thinking how your actions impact your colleagues and staff and figuring out how to reach more people with a similar action is an interesting exercise.

Another gem is the fact that a plan should be made based on where you want to be in the future. This sounds logical but a mistake I often make is identifying a shortcoming in the present and then make a plan on how to overcome this present gap. The result is that the gap widens even further in the future and you are always running behind the facts.

The third part of the book touches on how to organise a larger company. I am currently not really in a position to apply any of the advice to my professional life. Having said that, Grove's does highlight something that I think is worth sharing. Every organisation has departments that take a functional form and a mission-oriented form. An example of a functional form is to have a finance department or a logistics department. A mission-oriented department on the other hand is responsible for completing a specific business objective, and in turn could perform financial and logistical tasks among many other tasks. The issue that comes with having a hybrid organisation is that activities overlap, suddenly multiple departments are making their own decisions over similar issues. For example, part of a mission-oriented department needs to ship some products to a customer, a logistics activity. Maybe that same company also has a functional logistics department that handles most logistics within the company. Now who is "the boss" over this logistics activity? Grove provides an elegant solution for this called dual reporting.

We conclude the book with a fourth and final part. I am not a huge fan of the mentioned hierarchy of needs by Abraham Harold Maslow at the start of this part. However, I enjoyed reading about task relevant maturity. The categorization of it and its impact on the management style made sense. The chapter that follows was also valuable: Performance Appraisal. Grove alludes that he gave training on this topic within Intel and I feel that he has spent a lot of time thinking about it. It's hard to brush everyone with the same stroke but the stages of problem solving that he describes is recognizable in both myself as well as others. Additionally, he points out that during an appraisal there might be more than a few things that need to be discussed. When that's the case, it's important to focus on a few key things, not talk about every single issue. This, I realised, is something I have been guilty of in the past.

Grove seems like a pragmatic and reasonable person. The way with which he shares information and analyzes concepts is valuable and interesting.