Work Friends, Crimes against Robots and Street Surveys
Three More Key Insights from High Output Management by Andy Grove
Andy asks the question of whether you should be friends with the people you manage: Everyone must decide for himself what is professional and appropriate here. A test might be to imagine yourself delivering a tough performance review to your friend. Do you cringe at the thought? If so, don’t make friends at work
I think we have our priorities reversed. Shouldn’t we spend more time trying to improve the performance of our stars? After all, these people account for a disproportionately large share of the work in any organization. Put another way, concentrating on the stars is a high-leverage activity: if they get better, the impact on group output is very great indeed
Another group should also be included among middle managers in terms of their output and effect on organizations—people who may not supervise anyone directly but who even without strict organizational authority affect and influence the work of others. These know-how managers are sources of knowledge, skills, and understanding to people around them in an organization
About the book: An epic masterpiece for middle managers who are often the neglected middle. As expected some descriptions and examples didn’t age well.
Interesting Link
I don’t get modern art but this one got me. I now understand people who are polite to ChatGPT.
https://twitter.com/tarabull808/status/1661830594333114368?s=61&t=fyc-xcWkZFHDnxfhJQuNAA
Life Observations
One of my hardest work projects was standing in the summer on the streets of New York trying to get passersby to do surveys. Not only did the rejections sting but it didn’t help that there was an attractive competitor down the corner getting strangers to stop with ease. The one person who did stop commended my resilience and offered me a job in insurance sales and no she did not fill out the survey :). After that experience I will stop for people handing out flyers mainly because I want to keep my self image different from the cruel New Yorkers who ignored me.
Only recently did I learn this was called self signaling. For example when people make anonymous donations and strengthen their self image as a generous charitable person, not to be confused with social signaling which is more expensive or to be precise the price of a Porsche Boxster.