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

by Peter F. Drucker

a consultant who by definition has no authority other than that of knowledge must himself be effective—or else he is nothing.

the most effective consultant depends on people within the client organization to get anything done.

Their effectiveness therefore determines in the last analysis whether a consultant contributes and achieves results, or whether he is pure “...

The effective executives I have seen differ widely in their temperaments and their abilities, in what they do and how they do it, in their personalities, their knowledge, their interests—in fact in almost everything that distinguishes human beings. All they have in common is the ability to get the right things done.

What all these effective executives have in common is the practices that make effective whatever they have and whatever they are. And these practices are the same, whether the effective executive works in a business or in a government agency, as hospital administrator, or as university dean.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well. They

There is, in other words, no reason why anyone with normal endowment should not acquire competence in any practice. Mastery might well elude him; for this one might need special talents. But what is needed in effectiveness is competence. What is needed are “the scales.”

Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.

Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?”

Effective executives build on strengths—their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do.

Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.

They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions.

Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.”

Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process: • recording time, • managing time, and • consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

Effective executives know that time is the limiting factor. The output limits of any process are set by the scarcest resource. In the process we call “accomplishment,” this is time.

Time is also a unique resource. Of the other major resources, money is actually quite plentiful. We long ago should have learned that it is the demand for capital, rather than the supply thereof, which sets the limit to economic growth and activity.

But one cannot rent, hire, buy, or otherwise obtain more time.

The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it and no marginal utility curve for it. Moreover, time is totally perishable and cannot be stored.

There are constant pressures toward unproductive and wasteful time-use. Any executive, whether he is a manager or not, has to spend a great deal of his time on things that do not contribute at all.

Similar time-wasters abound in the life of every executive. When a company’s best customer calls up, the sales manager cannot say “I am busy.”

In every executive job, a large part of the time must therefore be wasted on things which, though they apparently have to be done, contribute nothing or little.

Yet most of the tasks of the executive require, for minimum effectiveness, a fairly large quantum of time. To spend in one stretch less than this minimum is sheer waste. One accomplishes nothing and has to begin all over again.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

This is particularly true with respect to time spent working with people, which is, of course, a central task in the work of the executive. People are time-consumers. And most people are time-wasters.

If one wants to get to the point of having an impact, one needs probably at least an hour and usually much more.

And if one has to establish a human relationship, one needs infinitely more time.

Since the knowledge worker directs himself, he must understand what achievement is expected of him and why.

The knowledge worker must be focused on the results and performance goals of the entire organization to have any results and performance at all.

Wherever knowledge workers perform well in large organizations, senior executives take time out, on a regular schedule, to sit down with them, sometimes all the way down to green juniors, and ask: “What should we at the head of this organization know about your work? What do you want to tell me regarding this organization? Where do you see opportunities we do not exploit? Where do you see dangers to which we are still blind? And, all together, what do you want to know from me about the organization?”

Time in large, continuous, and uninterrupted units is needed for such decisions as whom to put on a task force set up to study a specific problem; what responsibilities to entrust to the manager of a new organizational unit or to the new manager of an old organizational unit;

the Lord did not create people as “resources” for organization. They do not come in the proper size and shape for the tasks that have to be done in organization—and they cannot be machined down or recast for these tasks.

First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever.

The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?”

The first look at the time record makes it abundantly clear that there just is not time enough to do the things the executive himself considers important, himself wants to do, and is himself committed to doing.

A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes.

Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive.

Managers, however, need to be equally concerned with time-loss that results from poor management and deficient organization. Poor management wastes everybody’s time—but above all, it wastes the manager’s time.

The first task here is to identify the time-wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight. The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis that comes back year after year.

A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen. It can therefore either be prevented or reduced to a routine which clerks can manage.

Time-wastes often result from overstaffing.

A work force may, indeed, be too small for the task. And the work then suffers, if it gets done at all. But this is not the rule. Much more common is the work force that is too big for effectiveness, the work force that spends, therefore, an increasing amount of its time “interacting” rather than working.

In a lean organization people have room to move without colliding with one another and can do their work without having to explain it all the time.

Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings. Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

As a rule, meetings should never be allowed to become the main demand on an executive’s time. Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components.

They signify that responsibility is diffused and that information is not addressed to the people who need it.

The last major time-waster is malfunction in information.

Even worse, but equally common, is information in the wrong form.

Time-wasting management defects such as overstaffing, malorganization, or malfunctioning information can sometimes be remedied fast. At other times, it takes long, patient work to correct them. The results of such work are, however, great—and especially in terms of time gained.

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes.

The higher up an executive, the larger will be the proportion of time that is not under his control and yet not spent on contribution. The larger the organization, the more time will be needed just to keep the organization together and running, rather than to make it function and produce.