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

You need a way to translate your judgment into an algorithm or recipe so someone else can narrow down the list to a manageable size.

you want people to live the values of your company culture, you have to describe them in visible, behavioral ways that everyone can agree on.

Your job as a business owner is to learn as much as you can about how people will react (knowing you’ll never be able to predict it 100%), then use that insight to determine what your people can control and do your best to make the two line up.

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.

The OUTPUT is the result.

Those basic outputs for a company are: Serving customers: making something customers want to buy. Selling: finding those customers and selling to them. Supporting: doing all the back-office work that keeps the production and sales happening (e.g., finance, HR, facilities). Scaling: increasing the capacity to produce and sell.

They do this by providing tools, training, incentives, connections to others in the company, motivation, and anything else a person needs to produce good outputs.

everybody that needs to have access to the information also must be able to find it easily and quickly.

Your job as a business owner is to learn as much as you can about how people will react (knowing you’ll never be able to predict it 100%), then use that insight to determine what your people can control and do your best to make the two line up.