The Effective Executive

by Peter F. Drucker

It can no longer be improvised. It can no longer be groped for in a series of small adaptations, each specific, each approximate, each, to use the physicist’s terminology, a “virtual” rather than a real decision. It has to be a decision in principle. The computer is not the cause of this. The computer, being a tool, is probably not the cause of anything. It only brings out in sharp relief what has been happening all along. For this shift from the small adaptation to the decision in principle has been going on for a long time. It became particularly apparent during World War II and after, in the military. Precisely because military operations became so large and interdependent, requiring, for instance, logistics systems embracing whole theaters of operations and all branches of the armed services, middle-level commanders increasingly had to know the framework of strategic decisions within which they were operating. They increasingly had to make real decisions, rather than adapt their orders to local events. The second-level generals who emerged as the great men of World War II—a Rommel, a Bradley, a Zhukov—were all “middle managers” who thought through genuine decisions, rather than the dashing cavalry generals, the “beaux sabreurs” of earlier wars.

ccomplexity reaching down ever further. Now no longer something only those at the very top need to understand and handle. Nearly every executive now faces ccomplexity on a daily basis, and had better be familiar with what it is and how to go about navigating things.