The key ideas

High Output Management

Andrew Grove, 1983

Why can a manager work harder than anyone and still deliver almost nothing? Andrew Grove, who ran Intel for many years, looks at management through an engineer's eyes: as production, with its own bottlenecks, defects and levers. You'll learn how to measure a team's work, what meetings are really for, and how one hour of your time can multiply the work of many people.

Who it is for

For anyone who manages people or soon will. And for anyone who feels there is plenty of work from morning to night but no result to show for it.

Are you adding real value or merely passing information along?

The engineer who saw management as production

Imagine a waiter who has to serve a breakfast: a soft-boiled egg cooked for exactly three minutes, buttered toast and coffee. Everything hot, everything at once. It sounds trivial. But this is the very breakfast Andrew Grove uses to open a book about managing people and companies.

Grove was born in Budapest in 1936, fled Hungary for the United States at twenty, became a chemical engineer and in 1968 joined the newly founded Intel. He wrote High Output Management in 1983, when he was the company's president, and four years later he became its CEO. The book is aimed not at business stars but at ordinary managers: a department head, a lead engineer, someone who has just got their first reports.

Grove's main idea sounds almost like an engineering calculation. A manager is judged not by how much they did themselves but by what their team produced. And that means management is production too, and the same laws apply to it as to a factory or a kitchen.

You'll find out where the slowest link hides in your work, why a mistake is cheaper to catch at the start, how one hour of your time turns into hundreds of hours of other people's work, and what to do when a valuable employee says they're leaving.

The egg takes longest, so you start with it

Back to breakfast. Toast takes a minute, coffee is poured in seconds, and the egg boils for three minutes and can't be hurried. The book has a name for a step like this: the limiting step. It is the longest link, and everything else depends on it. The job of a kitchen, like that of any production line, is the same in Grove's eyes: deliver the product on time, at the right quality and at the lowest cost.

So breakfast is planned around the egg, not the coffee. First the egg goes on to boil, then at the right minute the bread goes into the toaster, and the coffee is poured at the very end. Start with the coffee and it will go cold while the egg boils. The whole process is built backwards, from the moment the plate has to land on the table.

Grove is sure the same logic works in any office. A report for a client, a software release or hiring a new person each has its own slowest step. A common mistake is to start with what's easy and quick and remember the long part when it's already too late.

The conclusion is simple. Before you take on a project, ask yourself which step will take the most time and what depends on it. Start there, and fit everything else around it.

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About the author

Andrew Grove (1936–2016) was a chemical engineer born in Budapest, one of Intel's first employees and its CEO from 1987 to 1998. He is considered one of the most influential leaders in Silicon Valley.

All books by this author: Andrew Grove

Terms from the book

  • Intel
  • Drucker
  • Leverage
  • Maslow
  • Self-actualization
  • Delegation
  • OKR
  • Limiting step: The longest step in a process, which decides when the whole result will be ready. In the book it is the egg, which takes longer than the toast and the coffee.
  • Incoming inspection: Checking what has arrived from a supplier before it goes into work. For Grove it is an example of the rule of catching defects at the cheapest stage.
  • Black box: An image from the book: a department or process where you can see what goes in and what comes out, but not what happens inside.
  • Indicator: A measure a manager uses to keep track of the work. For Grove a good indicator measures output, not activity.
  • Paired indicators: Grove's technique: track two measures at once, the effect and its downside, for example the stock in a warehouse and how often it runs short.
  • One-on-one: A regular meeting between a manager and one subordinate. According to Grove, it is the subordinate's meeting: they set the agenda.
  • Peer-plus-one: A phrase from the book: the senior person in a discussion, who argues as an equal with everyone else and makes the decision alone if there is no agreement.
  • Management by objectives: A system where work is guided by goals agreed in advance. An idea of Peter Drucker's, to which Grove added key results.
  • Key results: For Grove: measurable milestones that show whether you are moving towards the objective at the right pace.
  • Task-relevant maturity: Grove's concept: how well a person has mastered this particular job. According to Grove, the right management style depends on it.

All terms

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