The most worth reading book for middle managers.

The brilliant founder of Intel Company once created a market value peak of more than 500 billion dollars for Intel (yes, it is "lights, lights, etc."). );

1998, he defeated Diana, Princess of England, alan greenspan, the father of Dolly the Sheep and the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and became the man of the year of Time magazine.

At the same time, he also put forward and practiced a variety of management concepts, which inspired generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders;

He is the eternal idol of Steve Jobs. To what extent are idols? When Jobs meets the most important problems in his life, he will call him for advice as soon as possible, for example,/kloc-0 returned to Apple in 1997, and later learned that he had cancer.

Please allow me to introduce this management madman seriously. This is Andy Grove.

In this issue, I would like to recommend this book "Grove's First Lesson for Managers". Yes, it was written by Grove himself. Of course, you may have heard another book, only paranoia survives, which was also written by Grove. )

First of all, I want to say that the title of this book is terrible.

The original English name of this book is High Output Management, which is literally translated as High Performance Management. I don't know why I changed it to Chinese, and it dropped several grades.

But believe me, the title of China's book, flying in the sky, does not prevent it from being a great book. If peter drucker is a master of management theory, then Grove is a real fighter, and all his thoughts are based on decades of successful business practice.

As we all know, the middle managers of a company play a connecting role, from strategic top management to front-line employees. It can be said that they are the core strength of a company. This "Grove's First Lesson for Managers" is Grove's primary customs clearance textbook for middle managers with 20 years of experience accumulated by Intel.

Believe me, it is full of practical experience, all dry goods, and it is easy to read. Grove/Kloc-worked as a journalist when he was 0/4 years old, and he was also a high flyers, with a super degree (what degree? B.A. from City University of new york, Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley). His many years of management experience, combined with the master's exposition ability and complex enterprise management theory, can always simplify the complexity in his hands.

Whether you are just promoted to management, or you are experienced but still have a lot of confusion, you especially need to read this book.

Drucker's recommendation for this book is: this is an important book, and it says something very important.

Look, what a good recommendation letter.

So, what's important in this important book?

Focusing on how to improve managers' management output, this book expounds in detail performance evaluation, efficiency (leverage ratio), authorization, meeting, decision-making, organizational structure, motivation, communication, interview and how to retain excellent employees. Limited by space (Laos is too lazy), I only choose two or three points to expand here.

Before I speak, please allow me to talk about two other interesting and meaningful topics.

1.the dispute between KPI and OKR

Everyone is familiar with kpi (Key Performance Indicator). Yes, as long as you have worked in the company, you have basically been exposed to it. It is one of the most basic methods of enterprise evaluation.

Kpi is one of the most widely used tools, which has played a great role in countless companies. Then why is kpi so different for many enterprise managers and employees, and even many people hate it?

Kpi makes it clear that every employee's performance is determined by indicators, and the meaning of indicators is clear: what do you want to do and to what extent. So what problems will arise in this process?

1. indicator is not set properly;

2. It is difficult to set indicators, and after indicators are linked to performance, there will be a phenomenon that the means to achieve indicators are inconsistent with the original ideas, and the final goal will be biased.

There are so many employees complaining that the company makes them do a lot of meaningless things every day because of improper indicators. Only in this way, many employees will complain that doing the right thing for the company will not help their performance. On the contrary, some people use shameless means (which is actually not good for the company itself), but they have achieved the effect of promotion and salary increase.

It is difficult to set indicators, such as making a new thing, because it has not been made yet, so people still don't know what it is. It is likely that with the implementation of practice, the correct measurement indicators will gradually surface, which is very common in Internet startups.

This situation exists not only in internet companies, but also in traditional industries, such as hotel industry. For example, we set a goal: to improve the service level (customer satisfaction). In order to quantify the service level, we set two or three indicators, such as customer complaint rate and favorable rate.

In this process, many uncontrollable situations may occur. Some executives may have been staring at these two indicators, thinking that as long as they can meet the requirements of the indicators, they will even use various means to achieve their goals, such as deliberately letting dissatisfied guests not complain, such as manual brushing. However, the actual service level is not necessarily greatly improved.

It is for this reason that many companies, especially innovative Internet companies, choose another way: OKR.

For example, the famous google, twitter and facebook, as well as pea pods, Zhihu and LinkedIn China in China.

OKR (goal and key result) is the method of goal and key result, which emphasizes the key result of key result like kpi. The difference is that the goal plays a leading role, so the key results serve the goal more, while OKR emphasizes the relationship between the goal and the key results more.

After confirming this idea, OKR has become more of a management tool, and even the performance appraisal is not responsible. For example, facebook simply assigns performance evaluations to peer reviews. In this case, after the goal is clear, the key results even need to be adjusted with the progress at any time to meet the needs of achieving the goal.

Guess who was the earliest proponent and practitioner of okr?

Yes, it was our Andy Grove, then chief operating officer of Intel.

If you are interested in OKR, please click/P/CE1141084427.

2. How does it feel to fire yourself and the chairman of the company?

In the early days when Andy became the president of Intel, due to the strong impact of the Japanese electronics industry, the storage business of the company gradually declined. A large number of memory chips are accumulated in the warehouse and cannot be sold. At that time, Intel was still far from the market leader. 1985 One day, Grove felt it was time to make a change.

What he did was very funny: he fired himself and the chairman and CEO together.

In order to fully express his determination to start from scratch, he invited Moore, the chairman of the company, to walk out of Intel's building as if they had been fired.

He asked Moore a question: What do you think he would do if we stepped down and elected a new president? Moore hesitated and replied: He will give up the memory business. Grove said, "Then why don't we do it ourselves?"

Then, when they come back, it seems that they are no longer Andy Grove and Gordon Moore, but new senior officials who have replaced themselves in the past.

From then on, Intel turned from memory to microprocessor, which opened a generation of Silicon Valley overlord the glory of the king.

The above story was recently read in the book Eat Big Fish. Many times, we need to re-examine our own enterprises and work, re-examine with a "naive" thinking, and even find that many seemingly normal things are problematic.

The above two stories are given to you as "dessert before meals".

At dinner, Laos only intercepted two of them.

I. Managers' outputs

Grove put forward a point in the book,

The output of the manager = the output of the department directly under his jurisdiction+the output of the department indirectly affected by him.

He further came to a formula:

Manager's output = sum of organizational output = leverage ratio A* management activity A+ leverage ratio B* management activity B. ....

In this equation, every management activity that managers engage in (management activity AB ...) has more or less influence on the whole organization. The impact on overall output depends on the leverage ratio of this activity. The manager's output is the sum of these products. Obviously, in order to have higher output, managers should focus on activities with higher leverage.

The productivity of managers, that is, their output per unit time, can be improved in the following three ways:

1. Speed up each activity;

2. Increase the leverage ratio of each activity;

3. Adjust the combination of management activities, eliminate low-leverage activities and replace them with high-leverage activities.

I heard the word "leverage ratio" used in management for the first time. Come to think of it, there are quite a few such examples around.

For example, a manager hands-on, pays attention to big and small things, and does many things by himself, which is not as good as subordinates. As a result, I was tired and thankless, and my grades were not good.

Manager b, boldly assign work, pay attention to training, fully authorize, ignore minor matters and give guidance on major and difficult issues. In this way, the fighting capacity of the whole team is ridiculously high and comfortable.

Is it because of the level gap between the two subordinates? Not necessarily. It's just that manager B spends his time on the key parts that can improve the leverage ratio.

So, a middle manager, instead of always asking himself: Am I not doing enough?

Why don't you ask yourself: am I not doing well enough? Have you done too much?

Two. Application of incentive measures

In order to be effective, incentives must come from the hearts of all parties. What managers can do is to create a suitable environment for motivated people to perform well.

Motivation is used to improve performance, not to change a person's mood or attitude.

What we really care about is whether his performance can improve with the changes in the external environment. Attitude is not the output or result we want. What we are pursuing is that our subordinates will perform better.

This view is actually quite interesting. Grove is actually telling us that to be result-oriented, not process-oriented, the result must be the actual benefit output, not the attitude output.

We often meet a manager who motivates employees in various ways. As a result, employees have a correct attitude every day, without complaining, and everyone is in high spirits. However, the actual performance has not changed, which means that I am excited.

Once someone is motivated by self-realization, his motivation to work is no longer limited. This is the most important feature that distinguishes self-realization from other incentive models.

Once a person's motivation has reached the level of self-realization, he needs some standards to measure his progress. The most important measure is the feedback on his work performance. For a person who is committed to self-realization, the feedback actually comes from himself.

So the highest state of power is that it doesn't need power. At this time, the motivation of employees comes from self-realization. At this time, we have returned to the old topic mentioned above, and it is time to fully decentralize.

Grove described this process like this:

When the work maturity is low, the most effective management method is to provide clear and detailed instructions. In this case, the boss should tell his subordinates what to do, when to finish it and how to start.

With the maturity of subordinates' work, the most effective leadership style has also changed from organization to communication, emotional support and encouragement; Managers should pay more attention to this subordinate than the work in his hands.

At a more mature stage, managers' interference with subordinates should be further reduced, and the main management goal should be to determine whether the efforts of subordinates meet the needs of the department.

Once employees understand the operating values of the organization and have a high degree of work maturity, supervisors can start to delegate power, thus improving their management leverage.

When the employee's job maturity reaches the peak, the manager basically completes the training, and then the motivation of his work will mainly come from the internal self-realization motivation-this is the realm that a manager strives to pursue.

The above is just a simple interception of two points, which is quite theoretical. In fact, there are many things in this book. I really teach you how to do it. I hope you can take the time to have a look.

Domestic citizens are not familiar with Grove, because at the peak of Intel and Grove, the Internet in China was just a baby. However, as one of the leading figures in the previous generation of Silicon Valley and the founder of the spirit of Silicon Valley, Grove is well-known in the scientific and technological circles and has far-reaching influence.

Mr. Grove passed away on March 2, 20 161.

Finally, I quote mark anderson, a famous investor in Silicon Valley, on Twitter: Rest in peace, Grove. The best corporate founder in Silicon Valley (probably in the future).