Andy Grove does the math and shows that the opposite is true: Training is, quite simply, one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Consider for a moment the possibility of your putting on a series of four lectures for members of your department. Let’s count on three hours preparation for each hour of course time — twelve hours of work in total. Say that you have ten students in your class. Next year they will work a total of about twenty thousand hours for your organization. If your training efforts result in a 1 percent improvement in your subordinates’ performance, your company will gain the equivalent of two hundred hours of work as the result of the expenditure of your twelve hours.
American businessman
Finally, be clear in your own mind about your expectations for this person upon joining your company. What will this person do in the first thirty days? What do you expect their motivation to be for joining? Do you want them to build a large organization right away or hire only one or two people over the next year?
Once inside AOL, I was assigned to run the e-commerce platform and Marc became the chief technology officer. After a few months, it became apparent to both of us that AOL saw itself as more of a media company than a technology company. Technology enabled great new media projects, but the strategy was a media strategy and the top executive, Bob Pittman, was a genius media executive. Media companies focused on things like creating great stories whereas technology companies focused on creating a better way of doing things. We began to think about new ideas and about forming a new company.
Law of Crappy People. The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title. The rationale behind the law is that the other employees in the company with lower titles will naturally benchmark themselves against the crappiest person at the next level. For example, if Jasper is the worst vice president in the company, then all of the directors will benchmark themselves against Jasper and demand promotions as soon as they reach his low level of competency.
When things go well, the reasons to stay at a company are many: Your career path is wide open because as the company grows lots of interesting jobs naturally open up. Your friends and family think you are a genius for choosing to work at the “it” company before anyone else knew it was “it.” Your résumé gets stronger by working at a blue-chip company in its heyday. Oh, and you are getting rich. When things go poorly, all those reasons become reasons to leave. In fact, the only thing that keeps an employee at a company when things go horribly wrong — other than needing a job — is that she likes her job.
the reason that you have to fire your head of marketing is not because he sucks; it’s because you suck. In other words, the wrong way to view an executive firing is as an executive failure; the correct way to view an executive firing is as an interview/integration process system failure. Therefore, the first step to properly firing an executive is figuring out why you hired the wrong person for your company.
I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.” There are lots of smart people in the world, but smart is not good enough. I needed people who were great where I needed greatness. I needed people who really wanted to do the jobs they were hired for. And I needed people who believed in the mission —
Be aware that management books tend to be written by management consultants who study successful companies during their times of peace. As a result, the resulting books describe the methods of peacetime CEOs. In fact, other than the books written by Andy Grove, I don’t know of any management books that teach you how to manage in wartime like Steve Jobs or Andy Grove.