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July 18, 2020
Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.
The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends. These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts. Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified.
The books on manager development, for instance, envisage truly a “man for all seasons” in their picture of “the manager of tomorrow.” A senior executive, we are told, should have extraordinary abilities as an analyst and as a decision-maker. He should be good at working with people and at understanding organization and power relations, be good at mathematics, and have artistic insights and creative imagination. What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in scarce supply.
Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time.
To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.
The first step toward executive effectiveness is therefore to record actual time-use.
There is, in the research lab, the time spent by a senior physicist to write a “popular” news release on some of his work. Yet there are plenty of people around with enough science to understand what the physicist is trying to say, who can write readable English, where the physicist only speaks higher mathematics.
Please come if you think that you need the information or want to take part in the discussion. But you will in any event receive right away a full summary of the discussion and of any decisions reached, together with a request for your comments.”
One should only have on a team the knowledges and skills that are needed day in and day out
In an ideally designed structure (which in a changing world is of course only a dream) there would be no meetings. Everybody would know what he needs to know to do his job. Everyone would have the resources available to him to do his job.
Another fairly common method is to schedule a daily work period at home in the morning.
Executives who do not ask themselves, “What can I contribute?” are not only likely to aim too low, they are likely to aim at the wrong things.
For every organization needs performance in three major areas: It needs direct results; building of values and their reaffirmation; and building and developing people for tomorrow.
The man of knowledge has always been expected to take responsibility for being understood.
The only meaningful definition of a “generalist” is a specialist who can relate his own small area to the universe of knowledge. Maybe a few people have knowledge in more than a few small areas. But that does not make them generalists; it makes them specialists in several areas.
responsible for their own competence and for the standards of their work. In terms of formal organization, they will see themselves as “belonging” to a functional specialty—whether
People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment. If they demand little of themselves, they will remain stunted. If they demand a good deal of themselves, they will grow to giant stature—without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.
obvious but usually disregarded rule that one can either direct a meeting and listen for the important things being said, or one can take part and talk; one cannot do both).
Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.
People with many interests do exist—and this is usually what we mean when we talk of a “universal genius.” People with outstanding accomplishments in many areas are unknown. Even Leonardo performed only in the area of design despite his manifold interests; if Goethe’s poetry had been lost and all that were known of his work were his dabblings in optics and philosophy, he would not even rate a footnote in the most learned encyclopedia. What is true for the giants holds doubly for the rest of us.
The main reason is that the immediate task of the executive is not to place a man; it is to fill a job. The tendency is therefore to start out with the job as being a part of the order of nature. Then one looks for a man to fill the job.
When the orchestra conductor has to fill the job of first cellist, he will not even consider a poor cellist who is a first-rate oboe player, even though the oboist might be a greater musician than any of the available cellists. The conductor will not rewrite the score to accommodate a man. The opera manager who knows that he is being paid for putting up with the tantrums
The task of an executive is not to change human beings. Rather, as the Bible tells us in the parable of the Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.
That one actually abandons what one postpones makes executives, however, shy from postponing anything altogether.
As a rule it is just as risky, just as arduous, and just as uncertain to do something small that is new as it is to do something big that is new.
The effective executive does not, in other words, truly commit himself beyond the one task he concentrates on right now. Then he reviews the situation and picks the next one task that now comes first.
“disorganizer,” the creator of a different future and the enemy of today. In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today predominates. But from the very beginning, the Bell Labs shunned defensive research.
