Information as Leverage

I admit I don’t read many business books. I often find them anecdotal. They’re fine as entertainment, though I’d rather play games. But as career advice, they usually feel empty, overfitting into some neat-sounding narrative where your mileage may vary a lot, and your odds might not be better than Vegas.#

One exception is Andrew Grove — Intel’s legendary CEO and Silicon Valley’s CEO mentor. I want to recommend his book, High Output Management.#

Grove treats management as a production system. A manager’s job is to ensure high-quality inputs (information and signals), efficient processes (clear goals, information flow, meetings), and high-quality outputs (team performance and sound decisions).#

What’s most influential, and deeply woven into how Big Tech operates, is his argument that information workers are managers. Their “raw material” is information and know-how, and their output is influence: deciding what to build and how to build it. The people closest to the information have the most leverage; how well they use that leverage determines a company’s trajectory.#

That idea led to the distributed-decision model we see everywhere in modern Big Tech: decisions pushed down to those with the best information. But for that to work, each of us must:#

• Manage our own production process: maintain input quality, decision quality, and throughput.
• Manage our interfaces: communicate clearly and consistently with others.
• Manage our leverage: use our limited time and attention to maximize impact through decisions and influence.

If you subscribe to this view, you realize that being a “manager” isn’t a promotion; it’s just different work. Everyone here is a manager of their own output and leverage.#