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The Effective Executive is both a concise blueprint for effectiveness as an executive within an organization and a practical guide to managing oneself for performance and achievement, whether within an organization or on one’s own.
This book grew out of twenty years of consulting with business executives. But it was first developed as a program for the senior executives of the Eisenhower administration.
The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness.
Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.
Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.
Asked by the reporter, “How in this confused situation can you retain command?” the young captain said: “Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible. If these men don’t know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.”
Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results. And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.
The executive in organization is in an entirely different position. In his situation there are four major realities over which he has essentially no control.
1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else.
2. Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work.
The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does.
If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved. What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.
3. The third reality pushing the executive toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization.
4. Finally, the executive is within an organization.
Specifically, there are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside.
What happens inside any organization is effort and cost. To speak of “profit centers” in a business as we are wont to do is polite euphemism. There are only effort centers. The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.
The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends.
Executives of necessity live and work within an organization. Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the inside may blind them to the true reality.
The books on manager development, for instance, envisage truly a “man for all seasons” in their picture of “the manager of tomorrow.” A senior executive, we are told, should have extraordinary abilities as an analyst and as a decision-maker. He should be good at working with people and at understanding organization and power relations, be good at mathematics, and have artistic insights and creative imagination. What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in scarce supply.
I soon learned that there is no “effective personality.” * 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.
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 have to be acquired, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until “6 x 6 = 36” has become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.
These are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive: 1. Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control. 2. 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?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools. 3. Effective executives build on strengths—their own
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This three-step process: recording time, managing time, and consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.
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. People—the third limiting resource—one can hire, though one can rarely hire enough good people. But one cannot rent, hire, buy, or otherwise obtain more time.
Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.
The effective executive therefore knows that to manage his time, he first has to know where it actually goes.
To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks.
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?”
Among the effective executives I have had occasion to observe, there have been people who make decisions fast, and people who make them rather slowly. But without exception, they make personnel decisions slowly and they make them several times before they really commit themselves.
People-decisions are time-consuming, for the simple reason that 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. People are always “almost fits” at best. To get the work done with people (and no other resource is available) therefore requires lots of time, thought, and judgment.
Time-use does improve with practice. But only constant efforts at managing time can prevent drifting.
Systematic time management is therefore the next step.
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.
I have yet to see an executive, regardless of rank or station, who could not consign something like a quarter of the demands on his time to the wastepaper basket without anybody’s noticing their disappearance.
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?”
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.
Many executives know all about these unproductive and unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But this mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.
1. The first task here is to identify the time-wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight.
A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again.
2. Time-wastes often result from overstaffing.
3. Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings.
As a rule, meetings should never be allowed to become the main demand on an executive’s time.
4. The last major time-waster is malfunction in information.
The executive who records and analyzes his time and then attempts to manage it can determine how much he has for his important tasks. How much time is there that is “discretionary,” that is, available for the big tasks that will really make a contribution? It is not going to be a great deal, no matter how ruthlessly the executive prunes time-wasters.
The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there. The final step in time management is therefore to consolidate the time that record and analysis show as normally available and under the executive’s control.
Effective executives start out by estimating how much discretionary time they can realistically call their own. Then they set aside continuous time in the appropriate amount. And if they find later that other matters encroach on this reserve, they scrutinize their record again and get rid of some more time demands from less than fully productive activities. They know that, as has been said before, one rarely overprunes.
The focus on contribution is the key to effectiveness: in a man’s own work—its content, its level, its standards, and its impacts; in his relations with others—his superiors his associates, his subordinates; in his use of the tools of the executive such as meetings or reports.
The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.
The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results.
To ask, “What can I contribute?” is to look for the unused potential in the job. And what is considered excellent performance in a good many positions is often but a pale shadow of the job’s full potential of contribution.
