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

by Peter F. Drucker

“That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven,” Drucker writes. “But one can always manage oneself.”

Your first responsibility is to determine your own distinctive competences—what you can do uncommonly well, what you are truly made for—and then navigate your life and career in direct alignment.

Management is largely by example.

They concentrate on one task if at all possible.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

Knowledge Work

But this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do.

Everyone Is an executive

men

Ugh

He cannot, as a rule, like the physician, stick his head out the door and say to the nurse, “I won’t see anybody for the next half hour.”

What world is this

Specifically, there are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside. The only business results, for instance, are

Good point

These are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive:

5 practices

know where their time goes.

focus on outward contribution.

build on strengths—their

They do not build on weakness. They

do first things first—and second things not at all. The

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.

Time not tasks

This three-step process: • recording time, • managing time, and • consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

3 step process

If we rely on our memory, therefore, we do not know how time has been spent.

We cannot estimate time

sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a “zero draft”—the

5 hours?!

One can say to a manual worker, “our work standard calls for fifty pieces an hour, and you are only turning out forty-two.” One has to sit down with a knowledge worker and think through with him what should be done and why, before one can even know whether he is doing a satisfactory job or not. And this is time-consuming.

Evaluating Knowledge work is hard

The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again.

The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness:

Maybe a few people have knowledge in more than a few small areas. But that does not make them generalists; it makes them specialists in several areas. And one can be just as bigoted in three areas as in one. The

True

To focus on contribution is to focus on effectiveness.

Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas.

Not sure i believe this

They know that it does not matter how many tantrums a prima donna throws as long as she brings in the customers.

Nope

IF THERE IS ANY ONE “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration.

Yesterday’s actions and decisions, no matter how courageous or wise they may have been, inevitably become today’s problems, crises, and stupidities.

The effective decision-maker, therefore, always assumes initially that the problem is generic.

The effective executive encourages opinions. But he insists that the people who voice them also think through what it is that the “experiment”—that is, the testing of the opinion against reality—would have to show. The effective executive, therefore, asks: “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?”