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January 25 - June 4, 2024
one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.
it is concentration.
Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
There are always more important contributions to be made than there is time available to make them.
No matter how well an executive manages his time, the greater part of it will still not be his own.
Therefore, there is always a time deficit.
an iron determination to say “No.”
But concentration is dictated also by the fact that most of us find it hard enough to do well even one thing at a time, let alone two.
For doing one thing at a time means doing it fast.
Yet, as every executive knows, nothing ever goes right.
Effective executives do not race.
Effective executives know that they have to get many things done—and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate—their own time and energy as well as that of their organization—on doing one thing at a time, and on doing first things first.
The first rule for the concentration of executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be productive.
“If we did not already do this, would we go into it now?”
Executives, whether they like it or not, are forever bailing out the past.
“investments in managerial ego”
organizational obesity,
“Is this still worth doing?” And if it isn’t, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization.
This is necessary in order to keep organizational “weight control.”
Social organizations need to stay lean and muscular as much as biological organisms.
“Creativity” is not our problem. But few organizations ever get going on their own good ideas.
For the pressures always favor what goes on inside. They always favor what has happened over the future, the crisis over the opportunity, the immediate and visible over the real, and the urgent over the relevant.
To do five years later what it would have been smart to do five years earlier is almost a sure recipe for frustration and failure.
In fact accomplishing one’s priority tasks always changes the priorities and posteriorities themselves.
Effective executives, therefore, make effective decisions.
Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on the important ones.
They know that the most time-consuming step in the process is not making the decision but putting it into effect.
In most industrial laboratories, “defensive research” aimed at perpetuating today predominates.
“Is this something that underlies a great many occurrences?
The generic always has to be answered through a rule, a principle. The exceptional can only be handled as such and as it comes.
Truly unique events, however, must be treated individually. One cannot develop rules for the exceptional.
The effective decision-maker, therefore, always assumes initially that the problem is generic.
“If I had to live with this for a long time, would I be willing to?”
“A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers,”
The second major element in the decision process is clear specifications as to what the decision has to accomplish.
A decision, to be effective, needs to satisfy the boundary conditions.
“What is the minimum needed to resolve this problem?” is the form in which the boundary conditions are usually probed.
In fact, clear thinking about the boundary conditions is needed so that one knows when a decision has to be abandoned.
Yet, defining the specifications and setting the boundary conditions cannot be done on the “facts” in any decision of importance. It always has to be done on interpretation. It is risk-taking judgment.
“I shall not tell you what to study, what to write, or what conclusions to come to. This is your task. My only instruction to you is to put down what you think is right as you see it. Don’t you worry about our reaction. Don’t you worry about whether we will like this or dislike that. And don’t you, above all, concern yourself with the compromises that might be needed to make your recommendations acceptable. There is not one executive in this company who does not know how to make every single conceivable compromise without any help from you. But he can’t make the right compromise unless you
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For there are two different kinds of compromise. One kind is expressed in the old proverb: “Half a loaf is better than no bread.” The other kind is expressed in the story of the Judgment of Solomon, which was clearly based on the realization that “half a baby is worse than no baby at all.”
Converting the decision into action is the fourth major element in the decision process.
Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it?
The action must also be appropriate to the capacities of the people who have to carry it out.
“What kind of people do we have available to make this decision effective? And what can they do?”
Not that he distrusts the subordinate; he has learned from experience to distrust communications.
A DECISION IS A JUDGMENT.
It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but
But executives who make effective decisions know that one does not start with facts. One starts with opinions.
The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives.
