Grove, A.S. (2015). High Output Management. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

One thing I was especially impressed by Grove was his ability at abstracting complex, random or sometimes even chaotic human activities and turn them into the most fundamental principles that one can use to navigate those activities. This is likely why he is such a great teacher. In fact, as a guest lecturer in one of the courses at Stanford Graduate School of Business from 1989 to 1991, his teaching was so well received by the students that the professor of the course worried he might be out of his job if Grove continued to teach in his classroom (Burgelman, 2016). Grove’s ability of abstracting is best demonstrated in the book when he described his philosophy of management through the following equation:

“A manager’s output = the output of his organization + the output of his neighboring organizations under his influence”

In my opinion, this equation contains two key messages. First of all, a manager, regardless of what industry he/she is working in or what size the company is, should be measured by his/her output. Secondly, a manager’s output is not his/her individual work, but the output of the group of people under his/her supervision or influence. If we buy into this philosophy, then all the managerial concepts or activities that Grove introduced throughout the book would make a lot of sense. Doesn’t matter whether it is identifying the limiting step (the longest/most difficult/most sensitive/most expensive step), or managerial leverage (my own understanding of this concept contains two elements: 1) creating the biggest impacts and 2) reaching the widest audience, both with finite resources), or the process-oriented meeting (share knowledge and exchange information) and the mission-oriented meeting (solve a specific problem by reaching a decision) and the OKR, or the various organizational structures (summarized by Grove as “teams of teams”), or the cultural motivation and training that elicit the peak performance from the individual, they all serve one and only one purpose: to maximize the output of the manager’s own team and the neighboring teams under his/her influence.

Another thing that I was really impressed by Grove was his insights into human nature, especially the human bias/weakness that often prevent us from doing the right things. For instance, he observes that “when a meeting gets heated, participants hang back, trying to sense the direction of things, saying nothing until they see what view is likely to prevail. They then throw their support behind that view to avoid being associated with a losing position”. Grove knows it well that if such mindset and behavior persists, all it produces is bad decision. He believes creating an environment and culture in which “all points of view and all aspects of an issue are openly welcomed and debated” is the key. Moreover, he notices that a decision reached through heated debate won’t and shouldn’t be liked by everyone. However, once a clear decision has been reached, it should have the full support from everyone regardless of whether people like it or not. As he puts it: “an organization does not live by its members agreeing with one another at all times about everything. It lives instead by people committing to support the decisions and the moves of the business”. It would be great if we could make this part of Rubkrew’s DNA.

Above are just very few examples that stand out to me. Similar wisdom could be found pretty much everywhere in Grove’s book, perhaps the best way to do justice to the book is to read it, and reread it.