Andrew Grove

and when a group consensus emerges, one of the members will state it as a group opinion (“I think our position seems to be…”), not as a personal position. After a weak statement of the group position, if the rest of the mob buys in, the position becomes more solid and is restated more forcefully.

As a manager, you should remind yourself that each time an insight or fact is withheld and an appropriate question is suppressed, the decision-making process is less good than it might have been.

one of the manager’s key tasks is to settle six important questions in advance:
• What decision needs to be made?
• When does it have to be made?
• Who will decide?
• Who will need to be consulted prior to making the decision?
• Who will ratify or veto the decision?
• Who will need to be informed of the decision?

Your general planning process should consist of analogous thinking. Step 1 is to establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organization? Step 2 is to establish your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed? Put another way, where will your business be if you do nothing different from what you are now doing? Step 3 is to compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2. Namely, what more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand?

You need to focus on the difference between what your environment demands from you now and what you expect it to demand from you a year from now. Such a difference analysis is crucial, because if your current activities satisfy the current demands placed on your business, anything more and new should be undertaken to match this difference. How you react to this difference is in fact the key outcome of the planning process.

The key to both Bruce’s and Cindy’s efforts is that their planning produced tasks that had to be performed now in order to affect future events

the true output of the planning process is the set of tasks it causes to be implemented

The multi-plane organization enables me to serve as a foot soldier rather than as a general when appropriate and useful. This gives the organization important flexibility.

How does a manager motivate his subordinates? For most of us, the word implies doing something to another person. But I don’t think that can happen, because motivation has to come from within somebody. Accordingly, all a manager can do is create an environment in which motivated people can flourish.

A need once satisfied stops being a need and therefore stops being a source of motivation. Simply put, if we are to create and maintain a high degree of motivation, we must keep some needs unsatisfied at all times.