The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)

by Peter F. Drucker

Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., former head of General Motors, the world’s largest manufacturing company, was reported never to make a personnel decision the first time it came up.

Did he have a process/structure he worked through?

“What would happen if this were not done at all?”

And if the answer is, “Nothing would happen,” then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it. It is amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed.

But I have never seen an executive confronted with his time record who did not rapidly acquire the habit of pushing at other people everything that he need not do personally.

Is this true and to what extent?

Altogether, an enormous amount of the work being done by executives is work that can easily be done by others, and therefore should be done by others.

This can’t be true of the knowledge worker (earlier described as an exec)...so at what “level” does this apply?

A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen.

The definition of a “routine” is that it makes unskilled people without judgment capable of doing what it took near-genius to do before;

A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine. Similarly a well-managed organization is a “dull” organization. The “dramatic” things in such an organization are basic decisions that make the future, rather than heroics in mopping up yesterday.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization for one either meets or one works.

But if executives in an organization spend more than a fairly small part of their time in meeting, it is a sure sign of malorganization.

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule.

As a rule, meetings should never be allowed to become the main demand on an executive’s time. Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components.

“That’s easy. I have found out that my attention span is about an hour and a half. If I work on any one topic longer than this, I begin to repeat myself. At the same time, I have learned that nothing of importance can really be tackled in much less time. One does not get to the point where one understands what one is talking about.”

Block longer blocks of time for diving into deep work.

The larger the organization, the more time will be needed just to keep the organization together and running, rather than to make it function and produce.

The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

Consolidate time

But the method by which one consolidates one’s discretionary time is far less important than the approach. Most people tackle the job by trying to push the secondary, the less productive matters together, thus clearing, so to speak, a free space between them.

Guilty!

As a result, any new time pressure is likely to be satisfied at the expense of the discretionary time and of the work that should be done in it. Within a few days or weeks, the entire discretionary time will then be gone again, nibbled away by new crises, new immediacies, new trivia.

Guilty

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed.