Book Summary – High Output Management

 Key Points

• When under strong attack – lead with our strength by focusing on where we are strong at
• Types of managers
  • Know-how managers: people are who the specialist in their area of operation
    • The output neighboring organizations under his/her influence
  • Supervisors: people with ownership/accountability to specific decision
    • The output of a manager is the output of the organizational units under his/her supervision or influence
• A responsive company have fewer levels of managers:
  • leverage on electronic communication medium
  • this helps horizontally scale one of the key managerial activities – the role of information dissemination
• One on One sessions
  • mutual education and exchange of information
  • didactic management: always ask one more question until both feel they have gotten to the bottom of the problem
• Importance of the Growth mindset
  • If you want to work and continue to work, you must continually dedicate yourself to retaining your individual competitive advantage

Leverage

• Creating high output depends on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage
• a team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it
  • levers: training, motivation
  • choosing language/compiler that allows engineers to solve more problems per hour of programming
• Watch out for negative leverages
  • Meetings are a leverage mechanism
  • come prepared for meetings so as not to waste company time/resources
  • Avoid micro management
    • activity leverage is too low
    • subordinates start coming to you with every single decision that could have otherwise been made independently
• select activities of the highest leverage from other comparable ones
• Supervisory roles:
  • optimal 6 – 8 subordinates – half an hour dedicated to each person per week spread across multiple activities
    • otherwise either over-leveraged or under leveraged
• Dealing with interruptions
  • can be clustered and dealt with using a pre-prepared FAQ

Production

• Time management
  • work backwards from a required deadline to know the critical milestones you must meet and when

• Production operations
  • Process – manufacture
  • Assembly – put the manufactured parts together
  • Test – make sure the entire product is acceptable
    • Incoming or receiving inspection – costly
    • in process inspection – sampling based and not perfect
      • detect and fix at the lowest-value stage
      • Use paired indicators – to avoid over optimizing for one and under optimizing another part of the process
• Cost
  • Figure out alternatives
  • understand trade offs exist
  • figure out the most cost effective way to deploy your resources

Output versus activity

• Important to differentiate between output and activities
• Focus on increasing output and not on increasing activities
• Output
  • number of eggs produced per hour
  • increased conversion rate of new visitors to happy users for an existing product feature
• Activities
  • Meetings
  • decision making

Information gathering

• Written reports:
  • an archive of data
  • help validate ad hoc inputs gathered during casual conversation – safety net
  • forces the reporter to put his thoughts into clear coherent structure
• Conversation
  • high context but very sketchy

Maintaining Culture

• How you handle your own time is the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader
  • When you are walking around day to day to are a role model for people in the organization
  • You exhibit specific decision making behavior which should be a representation of the company culture
  • Our own time is the one finite resource
  • Apply your time on task that gives you the most leverage
• Promotion from within
  • candidate has high amount of shared experience with other members of the organization

Meetings

• Types
  • Mission Oriented Meetings
    • called in times of extraordinary events
    • too frequent of these means underlying process is not healthy
  • Process Oriented Meetings
    • regular protocol
• Watch out for peer-group syndrome
  • make sure people with veto rights are called into the meeting

Planning

• Plan as far out as 5 units of time
• But act on plans for the next 1 unit of time and then regroup at end of unit

Hybrid organizations

• Functional supervisor
• Mission supervisor

Control

• Important to choose method of control
• Factors
  • Complexity
  • Uncertainty
  • Ambiguity
• Modes – available
  • Supervise – tell them what to do
  • Communicate – provide them with information so that they know what they need to do
  • Monitor – watch what they are doing to check for deviation