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

by Peter F. Drucker

Effective executives never ask “How does he get along with me?” Their question is “What does he contribute?” Their question is never “What can a man not do?” Their question is always “What can he do uncommonly well?” In staffing they look for excellence in one major area, and not for performance that gets by all around.

man’s most specific gift: his ability to put all his resources behind one activity, one field of endeavor, one area of accomplishment. It is, in other words, contempt for excellence.

The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.

There are fairly reliable tests for the aptitudes and skills needed in manual work. One can test in advance whether a man is likely to do well as a carpenter or as a machinist. There is no such test appropriate to knowledge work. What is needed in knowledge work is not this or that particular skill, but a configuration, and this will be revealed only by the test of performance.

The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle-age, soured, cynical, unproductive.

Effective executives, therefore, usually work out their own radically different form. It starts out with a statement of the major contributions expected from a man in his past and present positions and a record of his performance against these goals. Then it asks four questions: a. “What has he [or she] done well?” b. “What, therefore, is he likely to be able to do well?” c. “What does he have to learn or to acquire to be able to get the full benefit from his strength?” d. “If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing to have him or her work under this person?” i. “If yes, why?” ii. “If no, why?”

There is, therefore, nothing more corrupting and more destructive in an organization than a forceful but basically corrupt executive. Such a man might well operate effectively on his own; even within an organization, he might be tolerable if denied all power over others. But in a position of power within an organization, he destroys.

The effective executive will therefore ask: “Does this man have strength in one major area? And is this strength relevant to the task? If he achieves excellence in this one area, will it make a significant difference?” And if the answer is “yes,” he will go ahead and appoint the man.

every people-decision is a gamble. By basing it on what a man can do, it becomes at least a rational gamble.

Making strengths productive is therefore much more than an essential of effectiveness. It is a moral imperative, a responsibility of authority and position. To focus on weakness is not only foolish; it is irresponsible. A superior owes it to his organization to make the strength of every one of his subordinates as productive as it can be.

Above all, the effective executive tries to make fully productive the strengths of his own superior.

It is, I submit, fairly obvious to anyone who has ever looked that people are either “readers” or “listeners”

Effective executives lead from strength in their own work. They make productive what they can do.

Effective executives are of course also concerned with limitations. But it is amazing how many things they find that can be done and are worthwhile doing. While the others complain about their inability to do anything, the effective executives go ahead and do. As a result, the limitations that weigh so heavily on their brethren often melt away.

But even where the situation does set limitations—and everyone lives and works within rather stringent limitations—there are usually important, meaningful, pertinent things that can be done. The effective executive looks for them. If he starts out with the question: “What can I do?” he is almost certain to find that he can actually do much more than he has time and resources for.

In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems. Nowhere is this more important than in respect to people.

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.

IF THERE IS ANY ONE “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

Concentration is necessary precisely because the executive faces so many tasks clamoring to be done. For doing one thing at a time means doing it fast. The more one can concentrate time, effort, and resources, the greater the number and diversity of tasks one can actually perform.

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.

Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities: • Pick the future as against the past; • Focus on opportunity rather than on problem; • Choose your own direction—rather than climb on the bandwagon; and • Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.

It is more productive to convert an opportunity into results than to solve a problem—which only restores the equilibrium of yesterday.

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.

Concentration—that is, the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first—is the executive’s only hope of becoming the master of time and events instead of their whipping boy.

Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on the important ones. They try to think through what is strategic and generic, rather than “solve problems.” They try to make the few important decisions on the highest level of conceptual understanding. They try to find the constants in a situation. They are, therefore, not overly impressed by speed in decision-making. Rather they consider virtuosity in manipulating a great many variables a symptom of sloppy thinking. They want to know what the decision is all about and what the underlying realities are which it has to satisfy. They want impact rather than technique, they want to be sound rather than clever.

Unless a decision has “degenerated into work” it is not a decision; it is at best a good intention.