If biotech is a team sport, the CEO or manager must be a master coach. If I had to recommend just one book to aspiring master coaches, it would be High Output Management by Andrew Grove, the former CEO of Intel.

20 key ideas from one of the greatest CEOs and management teachers:

As a CEO or manager you have to be obsessed with the output of your people.

Your Output = Their Output.

You can dive in, do stuff, and be heroically productive but that’s not going to maximise your output. Your job is to help everyone else do a great job.

A manager’s output = The output of his/her organisation + The output of the neighbouring organisations under his/her influence.

1. Managerial leverage is the impact of what managers do to increase the output of their teams. High managerial productivity depends on choosing to perform tasks that possess high leverage.

2. A manager’s work involves allocating resources: manpower, money, and capital. But the single most important resource that we allocate from one day to the next is our own time. How you handle your own time is the single most important aspect of being a role model and leader.

3. Your time is your one finite resource, and when you say “yes” to one thing you are inevitably saying “no” to another.

4. No amount of formal planning can anticipate changes within a business’s environment. 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 the ordinary.

5. The chairman of a meeting is responsible for maintaining discipline. It’s criminal to allow people to be late and waste everyone’s time. Wasting time here means that you’re wasting the company’s money, with the meter ticking away at the rate of $100 per hour per person. 

Do not worry about confronting the late arriver. Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.

6. When a person is not doing his job, there can only be two reasons for it. The person either can’t do it or won’t do it; he is either not capable or not motivated.

To determine which, we can employ a simple mental test: if the person’s life depended on doing the work, could he do it? If the answer is yes, that person is not motivated; if the answer is no, he is not capable.

7. The old saying has it that when we promote our best salesman and make her a manager, we ruin a good salesman and get a bad manager. But if we think about it, we see we have no choice but to promote the good salesman.

Should our worst salesman get the job? When we promote our best, we are saying to our subordinates that performance is what counts.

8. Given a choice, should you delegate activities that are familiar to you or those that aren’t? Before answering, consider the following principle: delegation without follow-through is abdication. You can never wash your hands of a task.

Even after you delegate it, you are still responsible for its accomplishment, and monitoring the delegated task is the only practical way for you to ensure a result. Monitoring is not meddling, but means checking to make sure an activity is proceeding in line with expectations.

Because it is easier to monitor something with which you are familiar, if you have a choice you should delegate those activities you know best.

9. Eliciting peak performance means going up against something or somebody. For years the performance of the Intel facilities maintenance group, which is responsible for keeping our buildings clean, was mediocre, and no amount of pressure or inducement seemed to do any good…

We then initiated a program in which each building’s upkeep was periodically scored by a resident senior manager, dubbed a “building czar.” The score was then compared with those given the other buildings. The condition of all of them dramatically improved almost immediately…

Nothing else was done; people did not get more money or other rewards. What they did get was a racetrack, an arena of competition. If your work is facilities maintenance, having your building receive the top score is a powerful source of motivation.

This is key to the manager’s approach and involvement: he has to see the work as it is seen by the people who do that work every day and then create indicators so that his subordinates can watch their “racetrack” take shape.”

10. Once someone’s source of motivation is self-actualization, his drive to perform has no limit. Unlike other sources of motivation, which extinguish themselves after the needs are fulfilled, self-actualization continues to motivate people to ever higher levels of performance.

11. Managerial meddling stems from a supervisor exploiting too much superior work knowledge (real or imagined).

The negative leverage comes from the fact that after being exposed to many such instances, the subordinate will begin to take a much more restricted view of what is expected of him, showing less initiative in solving his own problems and referring them instead to his supervisor.

12. You’ve learned that a valued employee has decided to quit. In such a case, you have to act fast to change their mind. If you put it off, your chances are lost. Timeliness here has very high leverage.

13. Don’t put off decisions that will affect the work of the team. The lack of a decision is the same as a negative decision. No green light is a red light.

14. If you still want to keep and not delegate certain activities that you enjoy doing, that’s okay. You deserve to and should do stuff that gives you energy but do it consciously.

15. When the environment changes faster than one can change rules, or when a set of circumstances is so ambiguous that a contract between the parties that attempted to cover all possibilities would be complicated, we need another mode of control which is based on cultural values.

16. In the end self-confidence mostly comes from a gut-level realization that nobody has ever died from making a wrong business decision, or taking inappropriate action, or being overruled. And everyone in your operation should be made to understand this.

17. My day always ends when I’m tired and ready to go home, not when I’m done. I am never done. Like a housewife’s, a manager’s work is never done. There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.

18. Is it better to be a hands-on or hands-off manager? It depends. If the employee is immature in the task, then hands-on training is essential. If the employee is more mature, then a delegate approach is warranted.

19. In order to build anything great, you have to be an optimist, because by definition you’re trying to do something that most people would consider impossible.

#20 is not another quote but a deep realisation of mine from reading this book multiple times and living it with my clients. There’s no single mention of the word “love” in this book but Andy Grove wrote this book with so much love—the same love that he had for his people.

We often look for magical tools and techniques to motivate our people but no intellectual trick can replace a leader’s love for his people, for the vision, for the impact—and in a biotech context—for the patients. When you truly care, it’s easier to mobilise people.