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.