High Output Management (1983) - 2021 Book #12

This week I finished reading the 12th book toward my goal of 50 for 2021 – High Output Management by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel.

Mr. Grove is widely considered the best CEO in the history of Silicon Valley. Unfortunately he passed away in 2016 at the age of 79. According to his Wikipedia page, he was Intel’s third employee and first Chief Operating Officer. He became Intel’s president in 1979, its CEO in 1987, and its chairman and CEO in 1997. He gave up his CEO title in 1998, remaining as chairman until late 2004.

Mr. Grove’s book High Output Management was published in 1983. According to Amazon, it has a print length of 272 pages. It took me 6 days to read, having started on Thursday, March 25, and finished on Wednesday, March 31.

I’m three months into the year. I have read 12 books. Doing some quick math, that leaves me at a pace of 48 books this year, 2 short of my goal. I’ll need to make up some ground.

Onto the review…

What High Output Management is about

High Output Management is Mr. Grove’s approach to management, supported by some of his philosophy of leadership. Mr. Grove gets tactical. He writes extensively about the importance of meetings. He describes different types of meetings, and who should be responsible for what in the context of those meetings. He also had a passion for performance reviews. He writes with great clarity about the obligations of managers, relying heavily on Intel-specific examples that translate nicely to other businesses.

One of the book’s big themes is leverage. Mr. Grove is intent on helping managers leverage their time to make the biggest positive impact on the company’s performance. And that last word – performance – is crucial. Everything in the book is built around performance. Getting results. There is no ivory tower nonsense here.

Why did I choose High Output Management?

I was recently reading a blog post by Ben Thompson at Stratechery. I believe he mentioned Andy Grove in that post, which reminded me of another post Thompson wrote several years ago praising Mr. Grove’s management books. Since I knew I would soon be finishing Behemoth, I was in the market for my next book, so I decided to take the plunge.

Why you would like High Output Management

If you like business books with tactical suggested practices, you would like High Output Management. If you like seeing inside the head of high profile business executives, you would like High Output Management. If you are driven to ensure you make the biggest positive impact on the performance of the business you work for, you would like High Output Management.

Why you would not like High Output Management

If you do not like business books, you would not like High Output Management. Not only is it a business book in the traditional sense – it doubles down on it. It’s granular and tactical in ways most business books aren’t. If you do not want to read about meetings or performance reviews, you would not like High Output Management. For better or worse, meetings and performance reviews are two of the most important tools available to a manager. Mr. Grove doesn’t dodge them.

Specific passages that captured my attention

First there’s this bit about Mr. Grove’s reverence for the middle manager. I wrote a note to myself at the end of this excerpt: “Flattery will get you everywhere, Mr. Grove.” And I stand by it.

Let’s back off for a moment and consider whom this book is aimed at. I am especially eager to reach the middle manager, the usually forgotten man or woman of any organization. The first-line supervisor on the shop floor and the chief executive officer of a company are both well appreciated. You’ll find many courses designed to teach the former the fundamentals of his work, while practically all of our leading business schools are set up to turn out the latter. But between the two is a large group of people—the middle managers, who supervise the shop-floor foremen, or who work as engineers, accountants, and sales representatives. Middle managers are the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, no matter how loose or “flattened” the hierarchy, but they are largely ignored despite their immense importance to our society and economy.

The part below resonated deeply with me. After laying out a schedule for one of his normal days, Mr. Grove emphasizes the importance of information-gathering for any manager:

It’s obvious that your decision-making depends finally on how well you comprehend the facts and issues facing your business. This is why information-gathering is so important in a manager’s life. Other activities—conveying information, making decisions, and being a role model for your subordinates—are all governed by the base of information that you, the manager, have about the tasks, the issues, the needs, and the problems facing your organization. In short, information-gathering is the basis of all other managerial work, which his why I choose to spend so much of my day doing it.

This last bit below surprised me a little. It’s in the context of performance reviews. Mr. Grove notes how much effort is steered toward improving the performance of folks that are struggling, compared with helping the strongest players perform even better. It’s kind of like doubling down on your strengths, rather than mitigating your weaknesses, but on an organizational scale:

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.

My overall impression of High Output Management

I quickly saw why High Output Management is so highly regarded within the business book genre. It is fast paced and easy to read, while still often getting out of the clouds to offer real, tangible practices to improve your performance.

It makes me think of how business books fall down. Either they’re all in the clouds and full of jargon. Or they’re in the weeds, with no philosophy or perspective to weave everything together. High Output Management is the best of both of those worlds, and it comes with the credibility of one of history’s most accomplished chief executives.

If you have any appetite at all for business books, I recommend High Output Management. If business books just aren’t your thing, I don’t think High Output Management will change your perspective.

My next read is When The Tempest Gathers: From Mogadishu to the Fight Against ISIS, a Marine Special Operations Commander at War by Andrew Milburn. It’s a departure from the subject matters I’ve covered so far this year. I’m looking forward to it.

As always, thanks for stopping by.