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

The output of a good team leader is a more effective team. They make sure the team members have what they need to do a good job. That starts with a clear understanding of what a good job looks like: the outputs that constitute good work. But people need more than clarity. They need tools, training, and time to do good work.

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.

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.

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

clear description of what the output of good work looks like. Knowledge work often means making decisions, so be sure to include decisions in this description of the output. A schedule or prioritization so your people know what to work on when in order for them to be productive to the rest of the organization. Workflows (which are diagramed when ap

“In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.”

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.

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.