Quotes About Efficiency

High managerial productivity, I argue, depends largely on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.

Thus, 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.

Insufficiently trained employees, in spite of their best intentions, produce inefficiencies, excess costs, unhappy customers, and sometimes even dangerous situations. The importance of training rapidly becomes obvious to the manager who runs into these problems.

a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.

The two basic managerial roles produce two basic kinds of meetings. In the first kind of meeting, called a process-oriented meeting, knowledge is shared and information is exchanged. Such meetings take place on a regularly scheduled basis. The purpose of the second kind of meeting is to solve a specific problem. Meetings of this sort, called mission-oriented, frequently produce a decision. They are ad hoc affairs, not scheduled long in advance, because they usually can't be.

Are you adding real value or merely passing information along? How do you add more value? By continually looking for ways to make things truly better in your department. You are a manager. The central thought of my book is that the output of a manager is the output of his organization. In principle, every hour of your day should be spent increasing the output or the value of the output of the people whom you're responsible for.

I think, by applying our production principles. First, we must identify our limiting step: what is the "egg" in our work?

Keep in mind that a meeting called to make a specific decision is hard to keep moving if more than six or seven people attend. Eight people should be the absolute cutoff.

Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

the performance rating of a manager cannot be higher than the one we would accord to his organization!

The long and short of it: if performance matters in your operation, performance reviews are absolutely necessary.

the basic requirements of production. These are to build and deliver products in response to the demands of the customer at a scheduled delivery time, at an acceptable quality level, and at the lowest possible cost.

How are we going to do this in the most intelligent way? We start by looking at our production flow. The first thing we must do is to pin down the step in the flow that will determine the overall shape of our operation, which we'll call the limiting step.

the performance rating of a manager cannot be higher than the one we would accord to his organization! It is very important to assess actual performance, not appearances; real output, not good form.

A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence.

Thus I will assert again that a meeting is nothing less than the medium through which managerial work is performed. That means we should not be fighting their very existence, but rather using the time spent in them as efficiently as possible.

Alfred Sloan summed up decades of experience at General Motors by saying, "Good management rests on a reconciliation of centralization and decentralization." Or, we might say, on a balancing act to get the best combination of responsiveness and leverage.

A manager must keep many balls in the air at the same time and shift his energy and attention to activities that will most increase the output of his organization. In other words, he should move to the point where his leverage will be the greatest.

Here I would like to propose Grove's Law: All large organizations with a common business purpose end up in a hybrid organizational form.

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

Here I'd like to introduce the concept of leverage, which is the output generated by a specific type of work activity. An activity with high leverage will generate a high level of output; an activity with low leverage, a low level of output.

You need to plan the way a fire department plans: It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

We must recognize that no amount of formal planning can anticipate changes such as globalization and the information revolution we've referred to above. Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate where the next fire will be, so it has to shape an energetic and efficient team that is capable of responding to the unanticipated as well as to any ordinary event.

Selectivity - the determination to choose what we will attempt to get done and what we won't - is the only way out of the panic that excessive demands on our time can create.