**Author:** [[3. Resources/Authors/Andrew S. Grove|Andrew S. Grove]] # Book Overview ![[High Output Management Visual.excalidraw]] ## About the Author Andrew S. Grove emigrated from Hungary to the United States in 1956 with almost no money and no English. He enrolled at the City College of New York, earned a PhD from UC Berkeley, and wrote an important semiconductor textbook while at Fairchild Semiconductor. He participated in the founding of Intel in 1968, became its president in 1979, and served as CEO from 1987 to 1998. Under his leadership, Intel transformed from a memory chip company into the dominant microprocessor manufacturer in the world -- a shift that required shutting down factories, redeploying thousands of employees, and abandoning the business the company was founded on. Time magazine named him Man of the Year in 1997. He taught at Stanford's Graduate School of Business for twenty-four years. Grove died in 2016, but his management philosophy continues to shape how Silicon Valley operates. Ben Horowitz, who wrote the foreword to the 2015 edition, credits Grove with teaching an entire generation of entrepreneurs how to manage. ## Central Thesis A manager's output equals the output of his organization plus the output of neighboring organizations under his influence. This deceptively simple equation reframes everything a manager does. It means that your knowledge, your skills, your technical brilliance -- none of it matters except insofar as it translates into improved output from the people around you. Grove builds the entire book on three interlocking ideas: apply production principles to all managerial work, maximize managerial leverage by choosing high-impact activities, and elicit peak individual performance through the right combination of training, motivation, and management style. The book treats management as an engineering discipline. Just as a factory has processes, throughput times, quality inspections, and limiting steps, so does every manager's work. Grove doesn't distinguish between "strategic" and "operational" work. He sees no hierarchy of prestige between the CEO's work and a middle manager's work -- both are production systems, both can be optimized, and both must be measured by their output. The manager who spends his day on activities with low leverage -- regardless of how urgent they feel -- is running a badly designed factory. ## Why This Book Matters High Output Management was published in 1983, yet its frameworks haven't aged. The breakfast factory analogy, the leverage equation, the task-relevant maturity model, and the training-as-leverage argument all translate directly to knowledge work in 2025. Ben Horowitz calls it a masterpiece that teaches managers how to be great, not merely competent. That distinction matters because most management books aim at competence -- they'll tell you to hold one-on-ones, but not how to structure them. They'll say to delegate, but won't explain the difference between delegation and abdication. Grove does both. The book also matters because of who it addresses. Grove explicitly writes for middle managers -- the people who supervise the shop-floor foremen, who work as engineers, accountants, and sales reps. He calls them the muscle and bone of every sizable organization, largely ignored despite their immense importance. His argument that every middle manager is a "micro CEO" capable of improving their own group's productivity regardless of what the rest of the company does gives the book a radical, empowering quality. You don't need executive permission to apply these ideas. You just need to start. --- # Chapter Summaries ## Part I: The Breakfast Factory ### Chapter 1: The Basics of Production Grove uses a waiter preparing a three-minute egg breakfast to introduce core production concepts. Every production flow has a limiting step -- the single step that determines overall shape and timing. You plan the entire operation backward from this step, offsetting other activities to ensure simultaneous delivery. He introduces three fundamental operations: process (physically transforming material, like boiling an egg), assembly (combining components into a new entity, like composing a breakfast), and test (examining characteristics against standards, like visually checking the toast). These categories apply far beyond manufacturing -- Grove maps them onto college recruiting, sales training, compiler development, and even the criminal justice system. The criminal justice analysis is particularly striking: he calculates that the cost of a single conviction exceeds a million dollars, while jail cells cost $80,000, and argues that building more cells is the obvious production optimization that society refuses to make. Throughout, he emphasizes that material becomes more valuable as it moves through the process, and problems should be detected at the lowest-value stage possible. ### Chapter 2: Managing the Breakfast Factory The breakfast factory scales up, and Grove introduces indicators -- measurements that give managers early warning about production health. He proposes five daily indicators: sales forecast, raw material inventory, equipment condition, manpower, and quality. The critical insight is that indicators must be paired: monitoring inventory levels alone drives them dangerously low, so you also track shortage incidence. This pairing principle applies universally. He introduces the "black box" concept -- when a process is too complex to observe directly, you measure inputs and outputs to infer what's happening inside. Grove discusses leading indicators (information that gives advance warning), linearity indicators (tracking progress against planned pace), stagger charts (comparing successive forecasts to detect systematic bias), and the inspection principles of receiving inspection, in-process inspection, and final inspection. He distinguishes between gate inspections (material cannot proceed until approved) and monitoring inspections (sampling to catch problems without blocking flow), and advocates variable inspection schemes where quality history is consistently strong. ## Part II: Management Is a Team Game ### Chapter 3: Managerial Leverage This is the book's conceptual core. A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of neighboring organizations under his influence. Leverage measures the impact of a managerial activity on output. High-leverage activities include: activities where many people are affected (a presentation to fifty people), activities where a brief input creates lasting impact (a word of encouragement or warning at the right moment), and activities that supply a key piece of information or insight to a large group. Negative leverage exists too -- a manager who waffles on a decision, demoralizing everyone waiting for it, has high negative leverage. Grove catalogs a manager's day into information-gathering, decision-making, and "nudging" -- providing opinions, preferences, and suggestions that influence the work of others without formal authority. He recommends batching similar tasks, building standard responses for recurring interruptions, and monitoring through indicators rather than ad hoc investigation. The chapter's practical spine is Grove's argument that managers should design their days around leverage, not urgency or comfort. ### Chapter 4: Meetings -- The Medium of Managerial Work Grove divides meetings into process-oriented (regularly scheduled) and mission-oriented (ad hoc, purpose-driven). Process meetings include one-on-ones, staff meetings, and operation reviews. The one-on-one is the supervisor's most important meeting -- the subordinate's meeting, held on his turf, running for about an hour. Its purpose is mutual education and information exchange. The subordinate should prepare an outline of issues; the supervisor should ask questions, probe for problems, and look for trouble spots. Staff meetings give the manager's direct reports a chance to interact with each other, not just with the boss. The manager's role is facilitator, not lecturer. Operation reviews provide a chance for people who don't normally interact to share information. Mission-oriented meetings should be kept rare (under 25% of total meeting time) and produce a clear decision. Grove is blunt: meetings are the medium of managerial work, not an interruption of it. The manager who complains about too many meetings is like a mechanic complaining about too many wrenches. ### Chapter 5: Decisions, Decisions Ideal decision-making involves free discussion, a clear decision, and full support from everyone involved, including those who disagreed. Grove identifies the peer-group syndrome -- the tendency of people at the same level to struggle with reaching decisions because no one wants to appear to override a colleague. The antidote is a designated chairman who forces the pace. He proposes a six-question framework for structuring decisions: what decision is needed, by when, who should be consulted, who decides, who ratifies or vetoes, and who needs to be informed. The chapter also addresses the danger of "striving for the best" at the expense of "good enough" -- decisions that drag on past the window of useful action because participants keep looking for the perfect answer. ### Chapter 6: Planning -- Today's Actions for Tomorrow's Output Grove argues that planning should answer three questions: What do you need to do? What's happening in your environment? What are you doing or going to do about it? The output of planning is a set of actions, not a document. He distinguishes between the "gap" (difference between where you are and where you want to be) and the actions needed to close it. Critically, he warns that today's gap represents a failure of planning sometime in the past -- a point Ben Horowitz highlights in the foreword. Management by objectives (MBO) is Grove's chosen implementation tool, with the caveat that objectives should be set high enough that the person has only a 50-50 chance of achieving them. If everyone always meets their objectives, the objectives aren't ambitious enough. ## Part III: Team of Teams ### Chapter 7: The Breakfast Factory Goes National The breakfast chain expands to multiple locations, introducing the tension between centralization (functional expertise, consistency) and decentralization (responsiveness to local conditions). This is the setup for the organizational design chapters that follow. ### Chapter 8: Hybrid Organizations Grove argues that every large organization eventually becomes a hybrid -- part functional (organized by expertise), part mission-oriented (organized by product or market). Neither pure form works alone. Functional organizations lose touch with customers. Mission-oriented organizations duplicate effort and sacrifice economies of scale. The hybrid captures both advantages at the cost of ambiguity. Alfred Sloan's principle of decentralized operations with centralized coordination is invoked as the grandfather of this approach. ### Chapter 9: Dual Reporting The inevitable consequence of hybrid organizations. Grove traces Intel's discovery of dual reporting to a practical problem -- where should plant security officers report? To the plant manager who sees them daily but knows nothing about security, or to the corporate security manager who sets standards but can't monitor attendance? The answer was both. Dual reporting evolved from this pragmatic origin into a company-wide principle. Grove introduces the "two-plane organization" where a person operates on one chart for daily operations and on another for coordination, task forces, or planning bodies. This multi-plane structure increases individual leverage -- a process engineer like "Cindy" can influence one plant through her daily work and all plants through her coordination group. ### Chapter 10: Modes of Control Three forces govern workplace behavior: free-market forces (self-interest, price-based transactions), contractual obligations (agreed-upon rules and standards monitored by supervisors), and cultural values (group interest, trust, shared objectives). Grove introduces the CUA factor -- complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the working environment. When self-interest is high and CUA is low, the market mode works. When group interest is high and CUA is high, cultural values become essential. When self-interest is high and CUA is also high, no mode of control works and chaos results. The practical implication: new employees, who are self-interested and unfamiliar with the culture, should receive structured, low-CUA jobs. Over time, shared experience builds cultural alignment, and they can take on more ambiguous work. This is why promotion from within strengthens organizations -- it builds the cultural capital that makes hybrid organizations function. ## Part IV: The Players ### Chapter 11: The Sports Analogy When someone isn't performing, there are only two possible causes: he can't do it (capability) or he won't do it (motivation). A manager has only two tools: training and motivation. Grove draws heavily on Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- physiological, safety, social, esteem, and self-actualization -- and argues that self-actualization is the only form of motivation without a ceiling. A person driven by competence mastery or achievement will push without limit. Money functions differently at each level: at lower levels it buys necessities; at higher levels it becomes a measure of achievement, which is why a venture capitalist who already has ten million dollars keeps working to make another ten. The sports analogy itself is the chapter's central argument: competitive sports elicit peak performance because they create a racetrack -- a clear arena with measurable progress and visible competition. Managers should create equivalent racetracks in the workplace. The facilities maintenance group at Intel dramatically improved when buildings were scored and ranked, without any change in compensation. The chapter closes with the manager-as-coach metaphor: takes no personal credit, is tough on the team, and was once a good player himself. ### Chapter 12: Task-Relevant Maturity There is no single best management style. The effective style depends on the subordinate's task-relevant maturity (TRM) -- a combination of achievement orientation, willingness to take responsibility, education, training, and experience, all specific to the current task. A sales manager who was outstanding in the field may have low TRM when transferred to run a factory. At low TRM, the manager should provide structured, task-oriented direction: tell what, when, and how. At medium TRM, shift to communication-oriented support: two-way discussion, emotional encouragement, mutual reasoning. At high TRM, minimize involvement: establish objectives, monitor, delegate. But regardless of TRM level, monitoring must continue -- the difference between delegating and abdicating. Grove uses the parent-child analogy: you tell a toddler "no" (structured), you accompany a child on his first bike ride (communicating), and you merely check in when the teenager drives off to college (monitoring). The chapter warns against confusing social friendships with communicating management style -- fishing trips don't count -- and against the common bias toward either full immersion or complete hands-off, when medium-involvement communication is what's needed. ### Chapter 13: Performance Appraisal The single most important form of task-relevant feedback. Grove is direct about the difficulty: giving reviews is hard because our culture discourages confrontation, and the review requires the manager to act as judge and jury. The purpose isn't to make the supervisor feel cleansed of all observations -- it's to improve the subordinate's performance. This means limiting the review to the few key messages the person can absorb, not delivering a laundry list. Grove's worksheet method: write down everything, find patterns, distill to messages, then cut messages down to the subordinate's capacity. He identifies the three L's of delivery: level (be totally frank), listen (use all sensory capabilities to confirm the message is received), and leave yourself out (it's about the subordinate, not your anxiety). For poor performers, he maps the stages of problem-solving: ignore, deny, blame others, assume responsibility, find solution. Getting someone from blaming others to assuming responsibility is the emotional step; finding the solution after that is the intellectual step and is easier. He argues that managers spend too much time on corrective action for poor performers and not enough trying to improve top performers -- a high-leverage inversion of priorities. Performance ratings of managers cannot exceed the rating of their organization's output. ### Chapter 14: Two Difficult Tasks Interviewing and handling a valued employee's resignation. For interviewing, the candidate should talk 80% of the time, and the interviewer should probe for four categories: technical skill, what the person did with that skill, discrepancies between capability and performance, and operational values. Grove admits candidly that even careful interviewing is high-risk -- he describes hiring someone after thorough interviews who was "a disaster from day one" and never finding a clue in his notes about what he missed. For resignations, the first moment is critical: drop everything and sit down immediately. Let the person talk through his rehearsed reasons, then keep probing for the real issues. Don't argue, don't lecture. Buy time. Then pursue every avenue to retain him, even transferring him to another department. The golden rule applies: today you save an employee for a fellow manager; tomorrow they do the same for you. ### Chapter 15: Compensation as Task-Relevant Feedback Money means different things at different levels of Maslow's hierarchy. The test: if the absolute amount of a raise matters, the person is motivated by physiological or safety needs. If what matters is how the raise compares to others', the person is motivated by esteem or self-actualization. Compensation should deliver task-relevant feedback, which means tying it to performance. Grove proposes performance bonuses that increase as a percentage of total compensation with seniority, and argues that any merit-based system requires competitive ranking -- a principle Americans accept in sports but resist at work. He addresses the Peter Principle directly: people get promoted until they reach incompetence, but the alternative -- leaving competent people in positions they've outgrown -- is worse because they atrophy. The solution to over-promotion isn't firing but recycling -- stepping the person back to a role they performed well. Management's job is to face its own error in judgment and support the person through the embarrassment. ### Chapter 16: Why Training Is the Boss's Job Training is one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform. Twelve hours of preparation and delivery for a course that produces even a 1% improvement in ten subordinates yields two hundred hours of improved work. But training must be closely tied to how things are actually done in the organization -- outside consultants teaching methods inconsistent with company practice do more harm than good. Training must be a process, not an event, and the manager himself must be the teacher. Proxies can't serve as role models. The manager's authority and credibility are the content as much as the material itself. Grove describes Intel's internal university of fifty-plus courses, including his own course on the company's history, objectives, and management practices, which he taught to a sizable proportion of Intel's professional staff. He closes with a practical blueprint: list what needs to be taught, take inventory of available resources, set a schedule with deadlines, accept that the first version will be rough, teach it to knowledgeable subordinates first, iterate, and request anonymous feedback. --- # Key Themes and Highlights ## Production Thinking Applied to Knowledge Work The book's foundational move is treating all work as production. A manager's day has inputs, processes, and outputs just like a factory. This reframe enables concepts like limiting steps, throughput time, quality inspection, and work-in-process inventory to apply to tasks like recruiting, strategic planning, and sales training. The power of the analogy is that it makes invisible work visible and measurable. ## Managerial Leverage as the Core Operating Principle Not all activities are created equal. A one-hour activity that affects one person is low leverage; a one-hour activity that affects fifty people or that sets the direction for a quarter's work is high leverage. The manager's fundamental job is to shift time toward high-leverage activities and away from low-leverage ones. This is more radical than it sounds -- it says that being busy is not the same as being productive, and that a manager's schedule is a design problem, not something that just happens to him. ## Task-Relevant Maturity as the Answer to "What's the Best Management Style?" There is no universal best style. Structured direction works for low-TRM subordinates; communicating support works for medium; monitoring and delegation work for high. The style must change not just per person but per task -- the same subordinate may need structured guidance on a new assignment and minimal oversight on a familiar one. The TRM model also explains why management rotations often produce temporary performance drops: the manager's general competence hasn't changed, but her task-specific maturity in the new role is low. ## Training as the Manager's Highest-Leverage Tool Grove's calculation -- twelve hours of training that produces a 1% improvement across ten subordinates yields two hundred hours of gained productivity -- is the book's most concrete argument for training as leverage. His insistence that the manager must be the teacher, not a proxy, distinguishes this from the standard corporate approach of outsourcing training to HR or external vendors. ## The Manager as Coach The sports analogy runs throughout the book. Peak performance comes from creating a racetrack -- measurable competition, visible progress, clear standards. The manager's role is coach: takes no personal credit, is tough, was once a good player. This framing resolves the tension between being demanding and being supportive. A good coach does both. ## Modes of Control and the CUA Factor Free-market forces, contractual obligations, and cultural values each govern behavior under different conditions. The CUA factor (complexity, uncertainty, ambiguity) determines which mode is most appropriate. In high-CUA environments, cultural values -- trust, shared objectives, common methods -- are the only mode that works. This explains why companies with strong cultures can tolerate ambiguous organizational structures that would paralyze weaker cultures. --- # Analytical Reading ## Main Arguments 1. A manager's output equals the output of his organization plus the output of neighboring organizations under his influence. 2. All work, including knowledge work, can be understood through the lens of production -- process, assembly, test, limiting steps, throughput time, quality inspection. 3. Managerial leverage is the measure of a manager's effectiveness. High output comes from choosing high-leverage activities, not from working longer hours. 4. Meetings are the medium of managerial work, not an interruption of it. One-on-ones are the most important meeting type. 5. There is no single best management style. The effective style depends on the subordinate's task-relevant maturity for the specific task at hand. 6. When someone isn't performing, there are only two possible causes -- capability or motivation -- and only two tools to address them -- training and motivation. 7. Training is one of the highest-leverage activities a manager can perform, and it must be done by the manager, not delegated. 8. Organizations inevitably become hybrids of functional and mission-oriented structures, requiring dual reporting and decision-making by peer groups. 9. Three modes of control -- free-market forces, contractual obligations, and cultural values -- govern behavior under different conditions of complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity. 10. Performance reviews are the most important form of task-relevant feedback and should focus on improving future performance, not cataloging past activities. ## Methodology Grove writes as a practitioner, not an academic. The book distills twenty years of managing at Intel into principles, illustrated with examples from Intel's operations, from everyday analogies (the breakfast factory, tire shopping, traffic lights), and from external contexts (the criminal justice system, a university, the military). He draws on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Hersey and Blanchard's situational leadership research, and Sloan's decentralization principles, but the theoretical framework is secondary to the operational reality. The persuasive method is inductive: here's what I observed, here's the principle I derived, here's how you can apply it. Grove tests his ideas against his own experience -- admitting when he gave bad reviews, when he hired badly, when he was wrong -- which gives the book credibility that prescriptive management literature rarely achieves. ## Strengths The book achieves what Ben Horowitz identifies as its three-part genius: it explains complex concepts in as little as one sentence, it uncovers genuinely new management ideas, and it teaches greatness rather than competence. The production analogy transforms management from a soft, intuitive art into a measurable discipline without stripping it of its human complexity. The leverage concept provides a practical, daily filter for decision-making. The TRM model resolves the eternal debate about hands-on versus hands-off management. Grove's honesty about his own failures -- the bad hire, the wrong performance rating, the subordinate he tried too hard to convince -- gives the prescriptions weight. The writing is plain, direct, and occasionally witty, reflecting Grove's engineering background and his impatience with pretension. ## Limitations The book's examples are drawn almost entirely from Intel and from a specific era of American manufacturing. The organizational design chapters (hybrid organizations, dual reporting) assume large, multi-division corporations; they require translation for small teams, startups, or remote-first organizations. The Maslow hierarchy, while intuitively appealing, has been challenged by subsequent psychological research. Grove's treatment of motivation skews toward individual achievement and competitive ranking -- it says little about collaborative motivation, intrinsic purpose, or the specific dynamics of creative work. The language throughout is male-coded and reflects the corporate norms of the early 1980s. The book assumes a stable employment relationship (long tenure, promotion ladders, pension-like expectations) that is increasingly rare. The 1995 introduction partially addresses the shift toward more fluid careers but doesn't fundamentally revise the frameworks. --- # Personal Reflection ## Key Takeaways The leverage concept is the most immediately useful idea in this book. It reframes the manager's day from "What am I doing?" to "What impact am I having?" Most managers confuse activity with output. Grove demolishes that confusion. If you can only do one thing differently after reading this book, start auditing your calendar for leverage. Classify every hour as low, medium, or high leverage. Then redesign your week to shift the balance. The TRM model is equally powerful, though harder to apply. It demands that you diagnose each subordinate's readiness for each specific task -- not a blanket assessment of their competence -- and then adjust your style accordingly. The common failure Grove describes is real: managers default to either full immersion or complete hands-off, when the middle ground of communicating support is what most situations require. The training-as-leverage argument is the book's most underappreciated idea. The math is simple and devastating. If you're not training your people, you're leaving the highest-leverage tool in your kit unused. And if you're outsourcing training to people who don't do the work, you're getting training disconnected from operational reality. ## Questions Raised - How does the leverage framework change in distributed, asynchronous organizations where a manager can't observe work in real time? - The TRM model assumes the manager can accurately assess maturity. What happens when the manager's own judgment is biased -- overestimating maturity in people who are similar to her, underestimating it in people who aren't? - Grove treats meetings as essential. What's the right adaptation for organizations that have replaced many synchronous meetings with asynchronous communication tools? - The sports analogy works well for competitive, output-measurable work. Does it apply to creative or research work where competition may actually inhibit the best outcomes? - How should the modes of control framework account for remote work, where cultural values are harder to transmit through osmosis and shared experience accumulates more slowly? ## Connections to Other Works - [[Execution]] by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan -- Bossidy's insistence that execution is the leader's primary job directly parallels Grove's argument that a manager's output is the output of his organization. Both reject the idea that "strategy" and "operations" are separate domains. - [[The Effective Executive]] by Peter Drucker -- Drucker's focus on contribution, effectiveness over efficiency, and the management of time aligns closely with Grove's leverage framework. Grove's approach is more concrete and prescriptive; Drucker's is more philosophical. - [[Good to Great]] by Jim Collins -- Collins' "Level 5 Leadership" and getting the right people on the bus echo Grove's twin focus on training and motivation as the only tools for improving performance. - [[Turn the Ship Around!]] by L. David Marquet -- Marquet's leader-leader model challenges Grove's more hierarchical assumptions. Where Grove says the manager must be the coach and teacher, Marquet argues that pushing authority and expertise down to the people closest to the information produces better results. - [[The Five Dysfunctions of a Team]] by Patrick Lencioni -- Lencioni's framework maps to Grove's modes of control: absence of trust corresponds to low cultural values; avoidance of accountability corresponds to weak contractual obligations. - [[The Lean Startup]] by Eric Ries -- Ries' build-measure-learn loop is a startup-specific version of Grove's production thinking, adapted for environments of extreme uncertainty where the CUA factor is permanently high. --- # Reading Notes - The breakfast factory analogy is simple enough to remember and rich enough to keep generating insights. It's the kind of metaphor that pays compound interest -- you find yourself applying it to new situations months after reading. - Grove's equation -- manager's output = organization's output + influenced organizations' output -- is one of the most concise and actionable definitions of management ever written. It eliminates an entire category of self-deception about what "good management" looks like. - The distinction between delegation and abdication is sharp: monitoring must continue regardless of TRM level. Delegation without monitoring is abdication. - Grove's admission that he gave a manager a high rating based on lagging output indicators, only to realize a year later that the performance had actually been deteriorating, is the kind of honest self-correction that makes the book trustworthy. - The criminal justice system analysis in Chapter 1 is a remarkable application of production thinking to public policy. It demonstrates that the production lens isn't just a corporate tool. - The concept of "standard responses" for recurring interruptions is simple and immediately applicable. If 80% of the interruptions you receive are variations on the same five questions, prepare responses and delegate. - Grove's insistence that the one-on-one belongs to the subordinate -- his meeting, his agenda, his turf -- inverts the common dynamic where the manager uses one-on-ones to get status updates. - The paired indicators concept (monitoring both inventory levels and shortage incidence) prevents the single-metric pathology that plagues most organizations. - The CUA factor framework explains why some people thrive in startups and others in large companies. It also explains why external hires into high-CUA roles so often fail -- they arrive with high self-interest and no cultural capital. - Performance reviews that don't attempt to improve future performance are useless. The worksheet method -- write everything, find patterns, distill to messages, cut to capacity -- is a practical corrective to the laundry-list review. - The "potential trap" warning is important: never rate a manager higher than you would rate his organization's output. Form without substance is the enemy. - Grove's practical assignment list at the end of the book -- scored in points, with 100 points as the threshold for "distinctly better" -- captures his engineering temperament. He doesn't just want you to think about management differently. He wants you to do something about it.