Output Thinking: Scale Faster, Manage Better, Transform Your Company

First you should decide what you want the output of the meeting to be—why you’re meeting in the first place. The agenda is a tool for how to get that outcome (and it may or may not be the best tool).

Honesty means … We are known for candor and directness. We give considered and constructive feedback. We are quick to admit mistakes. We never talk behind another person’s back.

have each person take the words in a company’s list of values and write what it means to them and how they see it in action.

“In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.”

Another option is to bifurcate your system. That means splitting it into subsystems, where the output of one is the input of the next.

Old-school managers thought they managed by making sure people put in the time at work. But good managers manage the output, not the activity. That’s true whether someone is working across from your desk, across the hall, or across the ocean. The output of management is the same whether the people they manage are in the building or remote.

As a manager, your job is to help people do better work and to align that work with the strategy and direction of the company. The work is not the effort they put in, but the outputs they produce. Alignment means they are producing outputs that matter.

These are the main benefits to bifurcation: More output (if you have different people doing each subsystem at the same time). Lower labor costs (if some of the subsystems can be done by people with lower salaries and less training). More places to improve quality.

Brilliant process management is our strategy. We get brilliant results from average people managing brilliant processes. We observe that our competitors often get average (or worse) results from brilliant people managing broken processes. —Daniel T. Jones, Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy

Breaking down systems to their most granular level makes it easier to train others to produce at least some of the output. You may also be able to see that software can automate parts of the process that you didn’t realize before.