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

That’s why it’s useful to specify certain types of decisions as outputs. Then they can be assigned to people and those people can be trained and evaluated.

The TRANSFORMATION is what happens to change the input into the output.

By properly describing all the outputs your company needs and then matching them with people’s unique mix of skills and training, you can solve this disconnect, grow your company faster, and be a better manager.

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

Parceling out problems requires a process known in the medical world as triage: assessing the urgency of the problem and matching it with the person who can best solve it. Good triage is an output in its own right.

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.

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.

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.

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.