High Output Management

Andy Grove ran Intel through its most critical decades and distilled everything he learned about managing a technology company into this absurdly practical book. High Output Management treats management as a production process — your output as a manager is the output of your organization plus the output of the neighboring organizations you influence. That framing changes everything. It means every meeting, every decision, every one-on-one is a production step that should be optimized.

The book covers everything from how to run a meeting (with a specific agenda format) to how to give performance reviews (with Grove's famous task-relevant maturity framework) to how to structure an organization. Ben Horowitz credits this book as the management bible of Silicon Valley, and he is not exaggerating. If you manage anyone — two people or twenty thousand — this is the most useful book you will ever read on the subject.