Andy Grove was the former chairman and CEO of Intel. “High Output Management” is consistently listed on reading lists for business, management, and entrepreneurship. Andy gives his perspective on building and managing a company by focusing on effective management processes. The book is broken down into three core areas:
1) Managing is the Work of a Business Perused by Teams
Andy claims that the output of the manager is the output of the teams under the manager’s control. I found this interesting since I often heard it in the service. As a leader, I was primarily judged by what my team accomplished or failed to do. I was ultimately responsible. This is most evident to the public when an incident occurs on a Navy ship and the leadership is fired.
The author also recommends a manager have no more than 6-8 subordinates. I can empathize with wanting to keep team sizes small and manageable. At some point, there are diminishing returns when growing and scaling a team and more delegation of decision making authority might be necessary. In the Marine Corps, the magic number is 3. The smallest unit, a fireteam, has one leader and 3 subordinates. This scales all the way to the top where the Marine Corps maintains 3 Marine Divisions on active duty.
Andy also talks about achieving managerial leverage. In order to increase your managerial productivity you can speed up your rate of work by applying production principles (like lean principles for individual workflow) or re-prioritize your activities to focus on those with the higher leverage (looking for nonlinear activities where a small input to a team has a large output)
