High Output Management

Grove ran Intel and wrote a management book grounded in production thinking, opening with a breakfast factory to explain limiting steps, capacity and quality control. The central idea is managerial leverage, the notion that a manager's output is the output of their organisation plus that of the organisations they influence, which turns the question of how to spend time into an arithmetic one. Chapters cover one to ones, staff meetings, decision making among peers, planning as a way of closing the gap between demand and capability, and the hybrid organisation with its dual reporting lines. The final section deals with performance reviews, interviewing, and what to do when a good person resigns. Still the clearest argument for why a manager should be gathering information and nudging rather than doing the work.