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January 25 - June 4, 2024
anyone who seeks how best to self-deploy on the few priorities that will make the biggest impact—is an executive.
#1: First, manage thyself.
#2: Do what you’re made for.
“What can a person do uncommonly well?”
eradicate weakness, yes, but only within strength.
#3: Work how you work best (and let others do the same).
#4: Count your time, and make it count.
First, create unbroken blocks for individual think time, preferably during the most lucid time of day; these pockets of quietude might be only ninety minutes, but even the busiest executive must do them with regularity. Second, create chunks of deliberately unstructured time for people and the inevitable stuff that comes up. Third, engage in meetings that matter, making particular use of carefully constructed standing meetings that can be the heartbeat of dialogue, debate, and decision; and use some of your think time to prepare and follow up.
This does not work well with neurodivergent people.
#5: Prepare better meetings.
#6: Don’t make a hundred decisions when one will do.
And there is an overhead cost to any good decision:
“inactivity can be very intelligent behavior”
#7: Find your one big distinctive impact.
“How will I know I’ve done a great job?”
What is the one absolutely fundamental contribution that would not happen without you?
#8: Stop what you would not start.
If it were a decision today to start something you are already in (to enter a business, to hire a person, to institute a policy, to launch a project, etc.), would you? If not, then why do you persist?
#9: Run lean.
#10: Be useful.
“It seems to me you spend a lot of time worrying how you will survive,” said Peter. “You will probably survive.” He continued: “And you seem to spend a lot of energy on the question of how to be successful. But that is the wrong question.” He paused, then like the Zen master thwacking the table with a bamboo stick: “The question is: how to be useful!”
Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned.
What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:
?
I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time.
He asked himself which of the two or three tasks at the top of the list he himself was best suited to undertake. Then he concentrated on that task; the others he delegated.
“What is right for the enterprise?”
Checking the results of a decision against its expectations shows executives what their strengths are, where they need to improve, and where they lack knowledge or information. It shows them their biases.
Systematic decision review also shows executives their own weaknesses, particularly the areas in which they are simply incompetent.
Listen first, speak last.
TO BE EFFECTIVE IS THE job of the executive.
get the right things done.
The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else.
Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work.
The third reality pushing the executive toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization.
Finally, the executive is within an organization.
The truly important events on the outside are not the trends.
They are changes in the trends.
Man, however, while not particularly logical is perceptive—and that is his strength.
“computeritis.”
If one cannot increase the supply of a resource, one must increase its yield.
All they have in common is the ability to get the right things done.
Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned.
what is needed in effectiveness is competence.
Effective executives know where their time goes.
Effective executives focus on outward contribution.
Effective executives build on strengths—their
Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.
Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions.
Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time.
The supply of time is totally inelastic.
