High Output Management by Andy Grove | with guest Tom Hunt

0:01Tom Hunt:Welcome to Business Book Club, where top entrepreneurs break down the most powerful insights from the world's best business books. I'm your host, Sam Brown, and today we're diving into a book that sits on the shelf of practically every major CEO over the past 40 years. Ben Horowitz called it the best book on management ever written. Mark Zuckerberg and Brian Chesky list it as a top influence. That book is High Output Management by Andy Grove. Grove wasn't just a manager, he was a scientist. As the CEO of Intel, he treated management as an engineering problem, focused entirely on leverage and maximizing production.

0:38Tom Hunt:But the question is, how do you apply theories from the 1980s to a fully remote business in 2026? Well, to help me answer that, I'm joined by Tom Hunt. Tom is the founder of Fame, a B2B podcast agency that he bootstrapped with zero funding to$4.5 million in annual recurring revenue. To get there, Tom had to stop being a marketer and start being a manager. In this episode, we break down exactly how he used Grove's framework to do it. We cover why your output is actually your team's output, why meetings are actually high leverage tools, and the art of delegation. So let's dive in. Tom, I asked you to choose the most impactful book you've ever read.

1:18Tom Hunt:Why did you choose High Output Management?

1:20Business Book Club:I feel like management is this like mystery. I guess they are schools of management, but I don't know what they actually teach. So it's like an ethereal thing that people don't really know what it is. Yet anybody who progresses past level one work, which is like actually doing the thing, has to be a manager. And so this is why I think this book is so seminal. It defines what management is and also explains what you should do to be a good manager. So I think without this book, especially in the people business like we have, it would be very hard for us to grow to 75 people without me understanding this, but then also us being able to share this information with the other managers in the business, which we have many.

1:57Business Book Club:Let's dive into that first lesson. What do you have up first? The output of the manager is defined as the total output of everyone that they manage. If you're a level one worker is what we call them. It's like someone who's actually, let's say, in our business editing the podcast, then it's very obvious what their output is. It's how many podcasts they've edited and what quality and what time. But then if you have the manager of like 10 editors, let's say, then it's not clear to that manager before I understood this, or it wasn't clear to me before I understood this, what their output is. And it's just very simple.

2:27Business Book Club:We can measure their success by the output of all the people that they manage. Quite a simple concept, but I think it makes it very clear to the manager, like what they're going to be judged on.

2:37Tom Hunt:When someone turns from an individual contributor to a manager, what's this misconception that people usually have?

2:44Business Book Club:I think there's two things that could go wrong. If the person isn't 100 % manager, and we have the if in our business, it might be like 75 % management spend and 25 % level one work. So if they're mixed, then that manager might think they're only being judged on the 25 % of the editing that they're doing, as opposed to the whole team. So I think that's the first thing. Second point, maybe they think that because they're not actually the people doing the work, the level one work, then it's not up to them. It's not within their control and therefore they shouldn't be judged on it. But that's not how this definition of management works.

3:14Business Book Club:It's your job to increase the output of the people that you manage.

3:18Tom Hunt:And I suppose the part of the difficulty here is understanding what can actually be measured so that a manager can see what their team's output is.

3:26Business Book Club:Yeah, I can give a specific example of how we do this. So we run X amount of podcast clients and we have a role and their role is to make the client happy and make the podcast successful. We call that person the account manager. So the account manager might have five to six clients. Now, obviously it's quite clear that the account manager's output is the success or retention of those clients. The account managers are managed by somebody called the account director. Now, the account director has their own clients, but also manages between one and three account managers. And so the primary metric for the account manager and the account director is retention.

3:58Business Book Club:So how many clients are still there at the end of the quarter? And so then the way we use this rule internally for the account director is that we say for your pyramid, we call it, your metric or your output is the total retention for the pyramid. So it's all the clients that are managed by your account managers and by yourself. And so it's very clear that that's what the account director has to optimize for. And then it's up to them to how they invest their time to achieve that retention goal.

4:23Tom Hunt:I know that you mainly hire entry-level positions. So you've probably got a lot of experience with this. People moving from an individual contributor position into a management position, how do you get them to stop thinking in a way that an individual contributor does it's quite easy for you as a founder to understand like if the team has some positive results then the organization has positive results it's great for you you're kind of at the top of the pyramid for like a mid-level manager understanding that their team's output is their output is a new concept and a bit intangible what's the training that you put them through how do you get them to understand this and internalize it.

5:03Yeah.

5:03Business Book Club:So we have a training program when an account manager moves to account director and the training program is actually very similar to what we're talking about today is basically based on the book. We have different books that people in the team can buy at different levels in the business and high output management, any account manager can order it because the account managers technically manage the people in the creative team and the project managers. So an account manager already has the groundings in high output management because they did that in account management training. But then we go into a bit more detail on how the pyramid works and how to manage account managers in that training where you go from AM to AD.

5:36Business Book Club:So really like the answer to that question is essentially often to read this book and then we have this training that summarizes this similar to what we're doing in this episode.

5:44Tom Hunt:Tell me a little bit about what steps did you take to increase your leverage by changing the way that you think about your output as your team's output? What are some of the practices that you do at FAME?

5:53Business Book Club:For me personally, the highest leverage thing I think I do, I only realized this in the last six months, is really focus on the P &L It's like the most abstracted form of information about the business, which I think has the highest leverage because essentially my job is to make the P &L look nicer, like make the numbers good in the P &L, like year on year. And so then what I do probably every week now is I look at the P &L, try to understand like the flow and the movement of the numbers. And then I just go to the person who's responsible for that part and be like, what do you think we should do about this?

6:21Business Book Club:Let's say it's ahead of growth. The marketing spend has actually been a little bit too low recently, and maybe that's having an impact on new revenue. And so then in my weekly meeting with the head of growth, I'll put in an agenda item like, here's the percentage of ads spent to revenue over the past few months is going down. Revenue isn't growing as fast as we want. What do you think we should do? So that's an example in the business of how I'm taking the most abstracted, highest level information and then using my management skills to then influence that number, ideally, because that would be the output of the manager that I'm trying to manage.

6:52Tom Hunt:Let's move on to lesson number two now, then. Meetings are the medium of management. So unpack that a little bit more for me, because most entrepreneurs say they hate meetings. And Grove's take on this is that meetings are the work. So why do you think founders have this allergic reaction to meetings?

7:11Business Book Club:And what is it that Grove's seeing that they aren't? When you say the word founder, the typical founder, I think this comes from like Silicon Valley, et cetera. And they're typically technical. And they typically might not understand or be that good at management. And so their view of productivity is writing really great code. And obviously, if you're in a meeting with another person or people, you can't write code. And so I think meetings do have a bad rep because people don't really understand what their roles are. They understand if they're a manager, then a meeting is a really useful tool to implement the communication that is going to improve the output of the manager and therefore your own output, as we discussed in the first lesson.

7:43Business Book Club:The reason I love meetings is that it gives me the opportunity to do the management communication that I need in order to increase the output of my manager. And so should I quickly lift the different types of communication that you can do? So they don't have to be within a meeting. They can be in any medium, but a meeting is a very good one to use them in. So we have information conveying and information gathering. And so it's basically you giving information or you collecting it. We have meddling, which is a very interesting one. We'll talk about it later. We have nudging. We have decision making.

8:12Business Book Club:We have monitoring. And then we have role modeling. Some of them are quite self-explanatory. You want to convey information. Let's say you have a new idea or the strategy has changed. You would explain that to the person you manage. You're also information gathering because they are closer to the information of the work in their function or that they're doing. And so you want to collect that information. Meddling is a fascinating one because on the surface, it seems like meddling is something that you should never do. The downside of meddling is obviously that you decrease the morale of the manager or the person that you manage.

8:39Business Book Club:But then the upside is that if that person is about to do something that has significant downside for the business, it probably is better for you to decrease their morale in the short term in order to not have the downside of the thing that they're about to do. One common mistake I see managers make is that they meddle too much. They don't understand that it has a downside and they just want to step in and do stuff themselves. But then over time, that really can decay the morale of that person. Yeah, nobody likes being micromanaged. Exactly. LinkedIn hates micromanaging. Now, nudging is a more subtle version of meddling.

9:09Business Book Club:So maybe in the meeting, you'd be like, okay, it's slightly off track. Do you have any thoughts about how we're going to get it back on track? That's, I guess, a combination of information gathering and nudging. Decision-making, again, decision-making is a very easy way in which you can meddle. Let's say you're managing a manager and they're managing a department. If they're constantly bringing every decision to you, or you're having to step in to make decisions, then the reality is that you're managing that function, not them. And so, especially with the people that I manage, if they come to me to make a decision, nine times out of 10, I will go back to them and be like, okay, what do you think?

9:38Business Book Club:And then over time, they start making these decisions. And instead of them coming to me in the meeting, they're like, this happened, this is what we did about it. Just letting you know. So that's decision-making. Monitoring is similar to information gathering, just like understanding what's happening, but without the manager or the person you're managing knowing. So I monitor quite a lot. So this is typically outside of a meeting. For us, everything's in Slack. And so all comms that are sensitive are in a channel. And so I can see what's going on in a lot of the business. So I'd like to monitor.

10:04Business Book Club:And then role modeling is actually something that you do without directly communicating. It's actually your manager is observing you and then ideally taking that behavior on themselves. Those are seven types of communication. And actually some of them can't really be done in a meeting, but meetings are a great opportunity to do most of them.

10:19Tom Hunt:Thanks for running through that. I'm interested in the types of meetings that you have. So I imagine that you do one-on-ones and then you'll have some other types of meetings, OKR reviews. Could you run us through what you do at Fame? Like how often you run one-to-ones? What other types of meetings do you have regularly? And the OKR reviews, how often do you run those?

10:38Business Book Club:And what do you do with them? There's four core types of meetings. Two of them are one-on-ones. So for all of my managers, I have a weekly, we call it the, every role has a code. So the head of account manager, it's called HAM. So it's HAM weekly meeting. And so the context of the meeting is the OKR. And then we're like going through things with information conveying and gathering to understand how we're performing against the OKR. Now, one thing that I think is very powerful is that if in between, like in the week, you know there's something that you want to say to your manager, but it isn't urgent, then I wouldn't just message them on Slack and tag them.

11:11Business Book Club:What I would do, I'd put it in the AOB section of the weekly meeting agenda so that I'm not interrupting their flow and they can still know it's going to get discussed because it's in that agenda. And then oftentimes what happens is that the manager is reviewing the agenda and will go in and then will potentially add a comment and it can get resolved before the meeting anyway. It's more of a productivity strategy than the management communication, but that I think can be very useful. Do you have a specific flow that you follow for every meeting? Some parts are the same. Some parts are different for different functions.

11:40Business Book Club:But it's typically review progress against OKRs is the first thing. It's the most important. And then there's probably some custom things for different meetings. Like with the head of growth, we'll do a pipeline review. But then there's always an AAB section. And there's always reviewing the actions from the last meeting. There's always an action section at the bottom for the actions from that meeting. And at the end of the meeting, you review all the actions to make sure everyone's aligned. And how long do they typically last for you? They're set for 15 or 30 minutes. Finance assistant is 15, but the head of account management one is 30 minutes.

12:07Business Book Club:I interrupted you. You were going through the four types of meetings that you have. So the second type of one-on-one meeting is what we call the monthly chat. So every manager has a monthly chat with their manager, typically 30 minutes. And we just go through four questions. So here's the more like performance career meeting. What went well in the last month? What didn't go so well? What would you like to learn slash do more of? And how can I be a better manager for you? And this is where you talk about more like high-level general performance stuff. you don't go into the details on the OKR or details on a specific project etc that's for the weekly meetings and here's also an opportunity to give like general advice about anything related to work or not depends on the person obviously if someone's pay review is coming up then you can discuss about the type of thing that you need in order to get a pay rise etc it's more like career

12:55Tom Hunt:management for the managers that's great so we've got the weekly one-to-ones surface the OKR as you talk through some of the more immediate working problems and you've got the monthly chat which is of a development chat, able to kind of zoom out a little bit and have a bit of a bigger overview of what's happening. And it also develops you as a manager. So that's the number one and two.

13:13Business Book Club:Number three, we have two team meetings for the whole company on Mondays and Fridays, 12 p.m. And this is more information conveying to the whole business. And so Mondays, we report on the OKRs and then we do what's called shout outs. Shout outs is throughout the week, if anything good happens, someone would shout it out in the team members channel. Let's say we launched a client show and the client was really happy. Then that would get tagged in the team members channel. And so all we do in the meeting is just run through those and I talk through them and then we get the person who did the shout out to explain it a little bit.

13:43Business Book Club:That's a nice little culture building kind of activity. I like that. For a remote company, you kind of need it, don't you? Exactly. But that meeting is only 15 minutes. And then the Friday one is 30 to 45 minutes. And in that meeting, we do any general updates from the leadership team or notices. And so recently I've been doing something called chart of the week. where on the Friday morning, I find or make a chart related to something in the business, and then I present it. The goal there is A, it makes me dig into more detail of the business, but B, also educates people more generally about the business.

14:13Business Book Club:And then we do weekly wins. So everyone goes around and says, well, their win from the week was. That's just a slightly longer meeting. Weekly win is part of the general updates meeting, the call hands. Yeah, exactly. So it's two team meetings. So it's Monday and Friday, and the weekly wins is on the Friday one. And then the final meeting type is the leadership meeting. So it's just a leadership team. There's four of us. And this takes an hour. It's largely based on EOS, which is Entrepreneurial Operating System. And so in that meeting, we're reviewing the scorecard, the OKRs, the issues list, the performance tracker, we call it, which is if we have any people on performance improvement plans, etc.

14:45Business Book Club:So that's an hour. Straight after that, we go into the team meeting where we give an update on the OKRs we've just discussed.

14:50Tom Hunt:So how long did this take you to get to figure out this cadence that this worked for you? because it seems like something that it all makes a lot of sense. Having run a company, it just could be kind of copy and pasted into most other companies, really.

15:01Business Book Club:Did you make some mistakes along the way? I think that that got locked in. There hasn't really been any changes to that meeting system. In the past year and a half, so we've been running the business for six years, so now four to five years to fully lock that in.

15:14Tom Hunt:You've got a big focus on OKRs. You review them in the weekly one-to-ones. You review them weekly in the team meeting. You also review them as a leadership team. So there's, I would say, more regular check-ins on OKRs than most companies do. What have you learned about OKRs? Because I know that they're notoriously quite difficult to implement initially. Take a few reps on getting right. Is this one of the main things that you need, like, more regular check-ins than you thought you did before?