What do executives do, anyway?

Another article highlighting great excerpts from Andy’Grove’s High Output Management.

Not exactly. It's harder than that. What executives need to do is come up with organizational values that indirectly result in the strategy they want.

That is, if your company makes widgets and one of your values is customer satisfaction, you will probably end up with better widgets of the right sort for your existing customers. If one of your values is to be environmentally friendly, your widget factories will probably pollute less but cost more. If one of your values is to make the tools that run faster and smoother, your employees will probably make less bloatware and you'll probably hire different employees than if your values are to scale fast and capture the most customers in the shortest time.

Why will employees embrace whatever weird organizational values you set? Because in every decision meeting, you enforce your values. And you fire the people who don't line up. Recursively, that means executives lower down the tree will do the same, because that itself is one of the values you enforce.

I must admit I’ve still not read this book, but I must. It feels like it is as canonical to many organizational theories as anything that Peter Drucker has written. I also appreciated the logical analysis at the bottom of this about why this doesn’t exactly apply in smaller companies.