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

by Peter F. Drucker

“What do we have to know to test the validity of this hypothesis?” “What would the facts have to be to make this opinion tenable?” And he makes it a habit—in himself and in the people with whom he works—to think through and spell out what needs to be looked at, studied, and tested.

Whenever one analyzes the way a truly effective, a truly right, decision has been reached, one finds that a great deal of work and thought went into finding the appropriate measurement.

The effective decision-maker assumes that the traditional measurement is not the right measurement. Otherwise, there would generally be no need for a decision; a simple adjustment would do.

Finding the appropriate measurement is thus not a mathematical exercise. It is a risk-taking judgment.

Whenever one has to judge, one must have alternatives among which one can choose. A judgment in which one can only say “yes” or “no” is no judgment at all. Only if there are alternatives can one hope to get insight into what is truly at stake.

Unless one has considered alternatives, one has a closed mind.

There are three main reasons for the insistence on disagreement.

It is, first, the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s becoming the prisoner of the organization.

Second, disagreement alone can provide alternatives to a decision.

Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination.

He starts out with the commitment to find out why people disagree.

“Is a decision really necessary?”

In this situation the effective decision-maker compares effort and risk of action to risk of inaction.

Similarly, there is no inherent reason why decisions should be distasteful—but most effective ones are.

Nine times out of ten the uneasiness turns out to be over some silly detail. But the tenth time one suddenly realizes that one has overlooked the most important fact in the problem, has made an elementary blunder, or has misjudged altogether.

The human being, by contrast, is not logical; he is perceptual.

All it can do is compute.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a “subject,” but a self-discipline.

“What makes for effectiveness in an organization and in any of the major areas of an executive’s day and work?”

Even more important is the social need for executive effectiveness. The cohesion and strength of our society depend increasingly on the integration of the psychological and social needs of the knowledge worker with the goals of organization and of industrial society.