The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done

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Considered one of the most influential management thinkers ever, Peter Drucker’s classic book on how to get the right things done is just as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1967. Managing your time, setting priorities, and effective decision making are just a handful of practical topics that Drucker covers with a fresh perspective. This book is an essential reference guide for anyone who aspires to become a more effective leader.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Time is your most valuable resource. Know how it’s spent.
2. Concentrate only on the most important contributions. Do first things first and second things not at all.
3. Focus on opportunities. Starve problems.
4. Always play to your strengths and build upon them.
5. Seek out disagreement when making decisions.

The Effective Executive Summary

Ten Lessons Jim Collins Learned from Peter Drucker

1. Manage thyself
2. Do what you’re made for
3. Work how you work best (and let others do the same)
4. Count your time, and make it count
5. Prepare better meetings
6. Don’t make a hundred decisions when one will do
7. Find your one big distinctive impact
8. Stop what you would not start
9. Run lean
10. Be useful

What Makes an Effective Executive?

1. They asked, “What needs to be done?”
2. They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”
3. They developed action plans
4. They took responsibility for decisions
5. They took responsibility for communicating
6. They were focused on opportunities rather than problems
7. They ran productive meetings
8. They thought and said “we” rather than “I”

Get the Knowledge You Need

• Focus on what needs to be done, not on what you want to do
• I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time
• Ask yourself which of the two or three tasks at the top of the list you yourself are suited to undertake. Concentrate on that task and delegate the rest.

Write an Action Plan

• Executives are doers; they execute
• Knowledge is useless to executives until it has been translated into deeds
• Action plans are intentions, not commitments. It should be revised often because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure.
• An action plan must have a system for checking the results against expectations

Act

• A decision has not been made until people know:
  • The name of the person accountable for carrying it out
  • The deadline
  • The people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about it
  • The names of the people who must be informed, even if they are not directly affected by it

Focus on Opportunities

• Focus on opportunities, not problems
• Problem solving prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.
• Change is an opportunity, not a threat
• Put your best people on opportunities rather than on problems

Effectiveness Can Be Learned

• Executives need criteria which enable him to work on the truly important
• Effective work is more often on the outside of an organization
• The truly important events on the outside are not the trends. They are changes in the trends.
• There is no such thing as an “effective personality.” Effective executives come in all shapes and sizes. But they all have a penchant for getting the right things done.

5 Habits of the Mind

1. Know where your time goes
2. Focus on outward contribution. Start with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done.
3. Build on strengths, never weaknesses. Do not start out with the things that you cannot do.
4. Concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. Do first things first and second things not at all.
5. Make effective decisions. It will always be a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.”

Know Thy Time

• Time is always the limiting factor
• Time is a unique resource – there is no substitute
• The supply of time is totally inelastic – it does not respond to changes in demand
• Everything we do is paid for by the minute
• Effective executives give several hours of continuous and uninterrupted thought to decisions on people if they hope to come up with the right answer

3 Step Process

1. Recording time
   • Know where it is being spent
2. Managing time
   • Eliminate tasks that do not need to be done. Ask yourself, “What would happen if this were not done at all?”
   • Delegate. Ask yourself, “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?”
   • Stop wasting other people’s time.
3. Consolidating time
   • Work in large chunks of time. Small driblets are no time at all.

Time Wastes Due to Poor Management

1. Lack of systems or foresight. The recurrent “crisis” that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again.
2. Over staffing. If the manager spends more than 1/10 of their time on resolving human conflict, the workforce is almost certainly too large. People are good at getting in each other’s way.
3. Malorganization. A symptom of excessive meetings
4. Malfunction of information. Not enough, or in the wrong form.

What Can I Contribute?

• Focus on your personal contribution
• Focus on results, and be less occupied with efforts
• People adjust to the level of demands made on them
• The man of knowledge has always been expected to take responsibility for being understood…If he wants to be considered responsible for his contribution – he has to concern himself with the usability of his “product” – that is, his knowledge
• Take responsibility for your own work, and your subordinates will follow suit
• If you demand little of yourself, you will remain stunted. If you demand a good deal of yourself, you will grow to giant stature – without any more effort than is expended by the nonachievers.

The Effective Meeting

• Know what you intend to get out of the meeting. State the purpose and expected outcome.
• Are you making a decision? Sharing information? Or clarifying what we should be doing?
• Always end the meeting by stating the original intent and outcome achieved
• The cardinal rule is to focus it from the start on contribution.

Making Strength Productive

• One cannot build on weakness
• To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths – the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities.
• Make staffing decisions to maximize strength, never to minimize weakness
• The idea that there are “well-rounded” people is a prescriptions for mediocrity if not for incompetence.
• Strong people always have strong weaknesses too
• No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective
• Effective executives never ask “How does he get along with me?” Their question is “What does he contribute?” Their question is never “What can a man not do?” Their question is always “What can he do uncommonly well?”
• It is a mistake to “fill a job.” Always look to “place a man.”
• Jobs must be objective, determined by the task to be done. Do not structure jobs to fit the personalities available.
• Effective executives rarely suffer from the delusion that two mediocrities achieve as much as one good man.

How to Staff for Strength

1. Remember that jobs are designed by highly fallible men. They are on guard against the “impossible” job, the job that simply is not for normal human beings. Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned.
2. Make each job demanding and big. It should have the challenge to bring out whatever strength a man may have. It should have scope so that any strength that is relevant to the task can produce significant results.
3. Start with what a man can do rather than with what a job requires.
4. To get strength, you must be willing to put up with weaknesses

Strengths Focused Performance Appraisals

1. What has he/she done well?
2. What, therefore, is he/she likely to be able to do well?
3. What does he/she have to learn or to acquire to be able to get the full benefit from his/her strength?
4. If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing to have him or her work under this person? Why or why not?

How Do I Manage My Boss?

• Make the strengths of your boss productive
• There is nothing more important to your rise in your career than a successful and rapidly promoted superior
• Most people are either readers or listeners. It’s generally a waste of time to talk to a reader. He only listens after he has read. It is equally a waste of time to give a big report to a listener. He can only grasp what it is all about through the spoken word.
• Some people need a single page report. Others need to know all of the details. Know which type of person your boss is.

4 Questions To Ask Yourself

• What can my boss do really well?
• What has he done really well in the past?
• What does he need to know to use his strength?
• What does he need to get from me to perform?

Making Yourself Effective

• Lead from your strengths.
• Do not concern yourself with what you cannot do. Focus all of your energy on what you can accomplish.
• There are always important things that need to, and can, be done.
• Know your work habits. Do you work better in the morning or at night?
• Be yourself. Don’t try to be something you’re not. Discern patterns from your own performance.
• Ask yourself, “What are the things that I seem to be able to do with relative ease, while they come rather hard to other people?”
• In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.
• The standard of any human group is set by the performance of the leaders. Never allow leadership performance to be based on anything but true strength.
• It is easier to raise the performance of one leader than it is to raise the performance of the entire group. Focus on the leader, and the group will follow suit.
• As in the parable of the Talents, the task is to multiply performance capacity of the whole by putting to use whatever strength, whatever health, whatever aspiration there is in individuals.

First Things First

• The secret of effectiveness is concentration. Effective people do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
• Concentrate your strengths on major opportunities.
• The secret of people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.

4 Characteristics of People Who Get Nothing Done

1. Underestimate the time it takes to complete any one task
2. Expect everything will go right
3. Hurry
4. Try to do several things at once

Sloughing Off Yesterday

• The first rule of concentration is to leave behind the past that has ceased to be productive.
• Ask yourself, “If we did not already do this, would we go into it now?”
• Unless the answer is an unconditional “yes,” you need to drop or curtail the activity sharply.
• Yesterday’s successes always linger beyond their productive life
• You must ruthlessly prune the activities that should do well, but for some reason do not produce. These “sacred” investments will drain the lifeblood of an organization.
• Always ask, “Is this still worth doing?” If not, get rid of it so that you can focus on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of your own work or the performance of the organization.
• Above all, the effective executive will slough off an old activity before he starts a new one.

Priorities and Posteriorities

• There is always more tasks to do than there is time to do them
• If the pressures rather than the executive are allowed to make the decision, the important tasks will predictably be sacrificed.
• Setting priorities is easy. Everybody can do it. The more difficult, and important, task is setting “posteriorities” – that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle – and of sticking to the decision.
• What one postpones, one actually abandons.
• Setting a big list of priorities where you hedge and try to do “just a little bit” of everything sounds nice. It might even make everybody happy. But the problem is that nothing whatsoever gets done.
• Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities:
  • Pick the future against the past
  • Focus on opportunity rather than on problem
  • Choose your own direction – rather than climb on the bandwagon
  • Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do
• Concentration – that is, the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first – is the executive’s only hope of becoming the master of time and events instead of their whipping boy.

The Elements of Decision-Making

1. Classify the problem correctly. Ask yourself, “Is this a generic situation or an exception?” Generic questions are answered with a rule, policy, or principle. Exceptions can only be handled as such. It is a common mistake to treat a generic situation as if it were a series of unique events. Better to start with the assumption that a problem is generic – that it is a symptom – and that the true problem is still at large.
2. Establish clear specifications as to what the decision must accomplish. What are the objectives the decision has to reach? What are the minimum goals it has to attain? What are the conditions it has to satisfy? In science, these are known as “boundary conditions.” Clear thinking about the boundary conditions is needed so that one knows when a decision has to be abandoned.
3. Start out with what is right rather than what is acceptable, because one always has to compromise in the end. If you do not know what is right to satisfy the boundary conditions, then you cannot distinguish between the right compromise and the wrong compromise.
4. Convert the decision into action. A decision will not become effective unless the action commitments have been built into the decision from the start. To make this happen, you must answer the following:
   • Who has to know of this decision?
   • What action has to be taken?
   • Who is to take it?
   • What does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it?
   • Do not overlook the first and last question!
5. Feedback has to built into the decision to provide a continuous testing, against actual events, of the expectations that underlie the decision. Even the best men are fallible. Even the best decision has a high probability of being wrong. Even the most effective one eventually becomes obsolete.

• “A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers.” It is a country which attempts to solve every problem as a unique phenomenon, rather than as a special case under general rules of law. Similarly, an executive who makes many decisions is both lazy and ineffectual.
• Failure to go out and look is the typical reasons for persisting in a course of action long after it has ceased to be appropriate or even rational.

Effective Decisions

• The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.
• Decisions are at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”
• Decisions are not made by starting with the facts. One starts with opinions that must be tested against reality.
• Decision making does not flow from a consensus on the facts. The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives.
• People start with their opinion, and then look for facts that fit the conclusion they already have. A good statistician distrusts all figures.
• An effective executive knows to start with opinions, but then asks, “What do we have to know to test the validity of this hypothesis?” He makes it a habit to think through and spell out what needs to be looked at, studied, and tested. He insists that people who voice an opinion also take responsibility for defining what factual findings can be expected and should be looked for.
• An effective executive insists on alternatives of measurement – so that they can choose the appropriate one by which to judge a decision.
• Unless one has considered alternatives, one has a closed mind.
• Foster dissension and disagreement, rather than consensus.
• No matter how high his emotions run, no matter how certain he is that the other side is completely wrong and has no case at all, the executive who wants to make the right decision forces himself to see opposition as his means to think through the alternatives.
• Every decision is like surgery. It is an intervention into a system and therefore carries with it the risk of shock. One does not make an unnecessary decision any more than a good surgeon does unnecessary surgery.
• Sometimes it is wise to ask, “What will happen if we do nothing?”
• A decision requires courage as much as it requires judgment

3 Reasons to Insist on Disagreement

1. To safeguard against the decision maker’s becoming the prisoner of special pleading and preconceived notions.
2. Disagreement alone can provide alternatives to a decision. And a decision without an alternative is a desperate gambler’s throw, no matter how carefully thought through it might be.
3. Disagreement stimulates the imagination.

Effectiveness Must Be Learned

1. The first step toward effectiveness is a procedure: recording where the time goes.
2. Focus your vision on contribution advances from the procedural to the conceptual, from mechanics to analysis, and from efficiencies to concern with results.
3. Make strengths productive is fundamentally an attitude expressed in behavior.
4. First things first. Leadership of dedication, determination, and serious purpose.
5. Effective decisions are concerned with rational action.

• The knowledge worker is quickly becoming the major resource of developed countries. They are the major investment, the major cost center. To make the knowledge worker productive is the specific economic need of an industrial developed society.
• The job of making the knowledge worker productive is far from complete
• The knowledge worker is not poverty-prone. He is in danger of alienation, boredom, frustration, and silent despair.
• We need to satisfy both the objective needs of society for performance by the organization, and the needs of the person for achievement and fulfillment.
• Self-development toward effectiveness is the only available answer. It is the only way in which organization goals and individual needs can come together. It is the marriage or organizational and personal achievement.

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• High Output Management
• The Effective Manager
• The Great CEO Within
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• The 21 Indispensable Qualities of A Leader

Blog Posts Inspired By The Effective Executive

These are the posts I’ve written that build upon some of the key ideas presented in The Effective Executive.

• Time is your most valuable resource
• Record thy time
• Manage thy time
• Consolidate thy time