Quotes from Andrew S. Grove

Monitoring the results of delegation resembles the monitoring used in quality assurance. We should apply quality assurance principles and monitor at the lowest-added-value stage of the process. For example, review rough drafts of reports that you have delegated; don't wait until your subordinates have spent time polishing them into final form before you find out that you have a basic problem with the contents.

The number of possible indicators you can choose is virtually limitless, but for any set of them to be useful, you have to focus each indicator on a specific operational goal.

Which five would they be? Put another way, which five pieces of information would you want to look at each day, immediately upon arriving at your office?

alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then balanced against delivery time.

Leading indicators give you one way to look inside the black box by showing you in advance what the future might look like. And because they give you time to take corrective action, they make it possible for you to avoid problems.

Organizations in the valley of death have a natural tendency to drift back into the morass of confusion. They are very sensitive to obscure or ambiguous signals from their management

Most people use their calendars as a repository of "orders" that come in. Someone throws an order to a manager for his time, and it automatically shows up on his calendar. This is mindless passivity. To gain better control of his time, the manager should use his calendar as a "production" planning tool, taking a firm initiative to schedule work that is not time-critical between those "limiting steps" in the day.

To use your calendar as a production-planning tool, you must accept responsibility for two things: 1.  You should move toward the active use of your calendar, taking the initiative to fill the holes between the time-critical events with non-time-critical though necessary activities. 2.  You should say "no" at the outset to work beyond your capacity to handle.

But at least you know that alternatives do exist: equipment capacity, manpower, and inventory can be traded off against each other and then balanced against delivery time.

What is important is the thinking you force yourself to go through to understand the relationship between the various aspects of your production process.

People who plan have to have the guts, honesty, and discipline to drop projects as well as to initiate them, to shake their heads "no" as well as to smile "yes.

We have now turned things into a continuous operation at the expense of flexibility, and we can no longer prepare each customer's order exactly when and how he requests it. So our customers have to adjust their expectations if they want to enjoy the benefits of our new mode: lower cost and more predictable product quality.

Values and behavioral norms are simply not transmitted easily by talk or memo, but are conveyed very effectively by doing and doing visibly.

As a rule of thumb, a manager whose work is largely supervisory should have six to eight subordinates; three or four are too few and ten are too many. This range comes from a guideline that a manager should allocate about a half day per week to each of his subordinates.

we should try to make our managerial work take on the characteristics of a factory, not a job shop. Accordingly, we should do everything we can to prevent little stops and starts in our day as well as interruptions brought on by big emergencies.

But because you must coordinate your work with that of other managers, you can only move toward regularity if others do too. In other words, the same blocks of time must be used for like activities. For example, at Intel Monday mornings have been set aside throughout the corporation as the time when planning groups meet.

a very important way to increase productivity is to arrange the work flow inside our black box so that it will be characterized by high output per activity, which is to say high-leverage activities.

Manufacturers turn out standard products. By analogy, if you can pin down what kind of interruptions you're getting, you can prepare standard responses for those that pop up most often.

Also, if you use the production principle of batching—that is, handling a group of similar chores at one time—many interruptions that come from your subordinates can be accumulated and handled not randomly, but at staff and at one-on-one meetings, the subject of the next chapter. If such meetings are held regularly, people can't protest too much if they're asked to batch questions and problems for scheduled times, instead of interrupting you whenever they want.

To implement the actual simplification, you must question why each step is performed. Typically, you will find that many steps exist in your work flow for no good reason. Often they are there by tradition or because formal procedure ordains it, and nothing practical requires their inclusion.

While in most instances the decision to accept or reject defective material at a given inspection point is an economic one, one should never let substandard material proceed when its defects could cause a complete failure—a reliability problem—for our customer.

the definition of "manager" should be broadened: individual contributors who gather and disseminate know-how and information should also be seen as middle managers, because they exert great power within the organization.

the key definition here is that the output of a manager is a result achieved by a group either under her supervision or under her influence. While the manager's own work is clearly very important, that in itself does not create output. Her organization does.

A team will perform well only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it.