If you’ve been around management books for any length of time, you’ll have heard of Andy Grove’s High Output Management. Written in 1983, it has none of the glossy packaging of today’s business books. No storytelling flourishes. No shiny diagrams. Just page after page of practical advice from the man who turned Intel into one of the world’s most powerful companies.

What makes it so enduring is its brutal clarity. Grove boils management down to one definition:

A manager’s output = the output of their team + the output of the teams they influence indirectly.‍

That one sentence should be printed above the desk of every leader. It’s a complete reframing of what management is for. Your job is not to look busy, not to “own your lane,” not even to keep your team happy. Your job is to maximise the total output you create through others.

For anyone who cares about alignment (as I do), this is gold. Alignment is about making sure people, teams, and functions move in the same direction with clarity and consistency.

Grove’s definition is a forcing function: if you only optimise your own patch, you are failing. Your true responsibility is the system as a whole.

The breakfast factory: alignment in disguise

Grove starts with an extended analogy: imagine you run a factory producing soft-boiled eggs and toast for breakfast. Your job is to get hundreds of breakfasts out the door, perfectly cooked, at exactly the right time.

It’s management stripped bare. You’ve got inputs (eggs, bread, heat), processes (cooking), outputs (the breakfasts), and constraints (time, quality standards, customer demand).

Where does alignment come in? Everywhere. If the toast is early and the eggs are late, the customer is unhappy. If the eggs are perfect but the coffee is cold, same result. Local excellence means nothing if the whole system doesn’t work together.

That’s the point: the job of management isn’t to create isolated brilliance. It’s to coordinate, balance, and align different components into one seamless flow.

Alignment levers in Grove’s playbook

As I revisited the book recently, I kept noticing how many of Grove’s core principles map directly onto alignment. It runs through pretty much every chapter.

1. Get the right information

Managers live or die by the quality of their information. Without it, they drift into assumptions, and teams go off in different directions. Grove insists on measurable indicators, regular reviews, and the discipline of checking reality.

In alignment terms, shared information is the anchor. If one department is working from rosy forecasts and another from hard numbers, they will inevitably misalign. It's a manager's job to go out and find information, not to wait for it to come to them.

2. Communicate context, not just tasks

One of Grove’s most important points: your job as a manager is to give context. Anyone can bark instructions. But if people don’t know why they’re doing something, they can’t make independent decisions that fit the bigger picture. This is exactly where alignment either holds or falls apart. Leaders who withhold context force employees into guesswork. Leaders who share it widely create autonomy without chaos.

3. Delegate effectively

Delegation is often confused with dumping. Grove clarifies: it’s about transferring responsibility at the right level, with enough oversight to ensure success. His concept of “task-relevant maturity” is simple but powerful: the less experienced someone is with a specific task, the more oversight they need.

Delegation done well extends alignment. Done badly, it creates duplication, gaps, and confusion.

4. Role model standards

Culture spreads from behaviour, not posters. Grove is uncompromising here: what you do as a leader sets the ceiling for what others will do. If you allow lateness, sloppiness, or poor preparation, expect it everywhere. This is alignment at the behavioural level. If leaders set and keep standards, they create a shared rhythm. If they don’t, everyone dances to a different beat.

5. Use meetings as alignment instruments

Many managers treat meetings as the enemy, and there has been a lot of focus in recent times about reducing meetings. Grove flips it: meetings are the manager’s tools.

• One-to-ones create vertical alignment between manager and employee.
• Staff meetings create horizontal alignment across the team.
• Taskforces create cross-functional alignment.

A bad meeting is wasted time. A well-run meeting is alignment in action.

6. Gather perspectives before deciding

Grove stresses that managers should deliberately seek out different viewpoints and generate multiple options before committing to a course of action. The debate should be open and rigorous, but once the decision is made, the discussion ends. Alignment doesn’t always mean universal agreement. It means that people understand the reasoning, feel their input was considered, and leave clear on the chosen path.

7. Use OKRs to cascade direction

Intel pioneered Objectives and Key Results under Grove. Done properly, OKRs create a chain of alignment: the CEO sets company objectives, which cascade into measurable results for each layer of the organisation. The trap is when OKRs become a spreadsheet exercise. Grove intended them as a live mechanism for alignment, not a quarterly ritual. In this way goal management systems are a key tool for alignment - the challenge is to keep them consistent and make them visible across the organisation.

8. Feedback and performance reviews

Without regular feedback, alignment erodes. People wander off course. Expectations drift. Grove treats performance reviews as critical alignment checkpoints: here’s the goal, here’s where you are, here’s what to adjust. Again, this is about creating mutual understanding on performance and next steps.

9. Training as leverage

For Grove, training is a manager’s highest-leverage activity. Teach once, apply many times. But more than efficiency, training is alignment infrastructure. It ensures consistent standards, language, and methods across the company. Neglect training, and alignment becomes patchy – everyone improvises their own way of working.

The outer circle: indirect influence

One of Grove’s most radical points is that a manager’s responsibility extends to the teams they influence indirectly.

• If you run Sales, your forecasts and processes affect Finance, Operations, and Marketing.
• If you sit on an exec committee, your preparation affects everyone’s ability to make good decisions.
• If you role model poor behaviour, it spreads far beyond your direct reports.

Too many managers pretend their only duty is to their immediate team. Grove calls that out as underperformance. Alignment demands that leaders look outward: how are my choices rippling across the organisation?

In my workshops, I sometimes draw two concentric circles:

• Inner = your direct team’s output.
• Outer = the output of the teams you influence.

Then I ask managers to fill them in. The inner circle gets plenty of ink. The outer one is usually sparse. That silence often says everything about where alignment breaks down.

Why leadership teams struggle with this

The leadership teams I work with rarely argue against alignment. Everyone nods along when we talk about shared goals and consistent messaging. The problem is in the doing.

• Staying in your lane feels safer. It’s easier to hit your own KPIs and ignore the knock-on effects.
• Information is fragmented. Each function sees part of the picture but not the whole.
• Delegation is patchy. Some managers hoard decisions, others abdicate. Both create misalignment.
• Meetings are badly designed. Time gets wasted, so leaders opt out, and alignment suffers.
• Feedback is avoided. Misaligned behaviours go unchallenged until they’re entrenched.
• Training is underfunded. Everyone’s “too busy” to build shared skills and language.

Grove’s genius is showing that these aren’t side issues – they are management. Neglect them, and output falls.

Challenge

Draw two concentric circles:

• Inner circle: your team’s output. List the top three results you’re responsible for.
• Outer circle: other teams influenced by your decisions, processes, or behaviours.

Think about your outer circle.

• Who outside your team is directly affected by how you operate?
• Where could you spend one hour this week that would save dozens of hours for another team?
• What ripple could you create if you gave more context, raised your standards, or fixed a process at the boundary between teams?

Write down one action that expands your impact beyond your lane. That’s where alignment begins.

Bring this exercise into your next leadership meeting. Share your circles. You’ll quickly see where alignment is thin, and where small changes could create big leverage.

Reflection

High Output Management may be four decades old, but it’s still one of the best alignment manuals out there. Grove understood that managers aren’t paid to look after their own corner. They’re paid to multiply effectiveness across the whole organisation.

That’s the essence of alignment. Clear information. Shared context. Effective delegation. Consistent standards. Well-designed meetings. Honest feedback. Cascading goals. Proper training. And the constant awareness that your job is bigger than your team.