The Effective Executive

by Peter F. Drucker

insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

effectiveness is the specific technology of the knowledge worker within an organization.

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped.

He produces knowledge, ideas, information.

The only resource in respect to which America can possibly have a competitive advantage is education.

Even the boy who graduates from college without any specific professional competence represents an investment of $50,000 or more. This only a very rich society can afford.

he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results,

Such a man (or woman) must make decisions; he cannot just carry out orders.

One third he thought he was spending with his senior men. One third he thought he spent with his important customers. And one third he thought was devoted to community activities.

The record showed, however, that he spent most of his hours as a kind of dispatcher, keeping track of orders from customers he personally knew, and bothering the plant with telephone calls about them.

My friend had no illusions that these dinners contributed anything either to the company or to his own entertainment or self-development.

the chances of his daughter’s getting into the right college.

To write a report may, for instance, require six or eight hours, at least for the first draft.

The same goes for an experiment. One simply has to have five to twelve hours in a single stretch to set up the apparatus and to do at least one completed run.

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.

Moreover, because knowledge work cannot be measured the way manual work can, one cannot tell a knowledge worker in a few simple words whether he is doing the right job and how well he is doing it.

think through with him what should be done and why, before one can even know whether he is doing a satisfactory job or not.

“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?”

an accountant, a sales manager, and a manufacturing man,

“No secret—I have simply accepted that the first name I come up with is likely to be the wrong name—and I therefore retrace the whole process of thought and analysis a few times before I act.”

they have to give several hours of continuous and uninterrupted thought to decisions on people if they hope to come up with the right answer.

People are always “almost fits” at best.

a high standard of living presupposes an economy of innovation and change.

A good many effective executives keep such a log continuously and look at it regularly every month.

1. 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.

There are, for instance, the countless speeches, dinners, committee memberships, and directorships which take an unconscionable toll of the time of busy people,

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

There are the hours spent discussing a document before there is even a first draft that can be discussed.

3. 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.

“I have asked [Messrs Smith, Jones, and Robinson] to meet with me [Wednesday at 3] in [the fourth floor conference room] to discuss budget. Please come if you think that you need the information or want to take part in the discussion. But you will in any event receive right away a full summary of the discussion and of any decisions reached, together with a request for your comments.”

1. The first task here is to identify the time-wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight.

2. Time-wastes often result from overstaffing.

3. 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.

We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done. We meet because the knowledge and experience needed in a specific situation are not available in one head, but have to be pieced together out of the experience and knowledge of several people.

4. The last major time-waster is malfunction in information.

My appointment was always for an hour and a half.

There was never more than one item on the agenda.

“Mr. Drucker, I believe you’d better sum up now and outline what we should do next.”

done—the seeing of important customers who just “dropped in,” attendance at meetings which could just as well have proceeded without him; specific decisions on daily problems that should not have reached him but invariably did.

Some people, usually senior men, work at home one day a week; this is a particularly common method of time-consolidation for editors or research scientists.

Other men schedule all the operating work—the meetings, reviews, problem-sessions, and so on for two days a week, for example, Monday and Friday, and set aside the mornings of the remaining days for consistent, continuing work on major issues.

Monday and Friday he had his operating meetings, saw senior executives on current matters, was available to important customers, and so on.

But in the mornings of these three days he scheduled the work on the major matters—in chunks of ninety minutes each.

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.

The meeting, the report, or the presentation are the typical work situation of the executive.

“Why are we having this meeting? Do we want a decision, do we want to inform, or do we want to make clear to ourselves what we should be doing?”

There are other rules for making a meeting productive (for instance, the obvious but usually disregarded rule that one can either direct a meeting and listen for the important things being said, or one can take part and talk; one cannot do both).

Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of human knowledge, experience, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to be rated a total failure. There is no such thing as a “good man.” Good for what? is the question.

Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors.