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

You want problems solved by the right people who can do it most effectively.

You really should encourage people to update the documents any time there’s an improvement in how things are done. But a regularly scheduled update is a good backstop.

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

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).

Good management starts by defining what outputs someone needs to produce.

It should include the necessary attributes (like quantity and quality) of outputs

An output is something visible: an outcome, a deliverable, an obvious behavior; something produced after doing some work.

It’s accountability all the way down. Sounds simple when it’s said like that. But a culture of accountability is not as common as you’d think. It’s simple but not easy, and incredibly powerful—even though it leads to hard conversations if the outputs are not adequate.

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