The Effective Executive
Drucker’s work was written during the mid-20th century, taking anecdotes from the many great American industrial empires and their people and packaging them all into a 5-point guidebook for people to do the right things better at work. Drucker is at times gets a bit in the clouds, but most of his examples make use of the management-consulting/MBA style case studies, which offer clarity of argument points at the cost of post-hoc rationalizing. His core principles to become more “effective”, or to do the right things better, are: manage and consolidate chunks of working time, focus on the result rather than actions, build on the team’s strengths instead of patching up weaknesses, focusing on the most important priority and ignore the rest, and make good decisions (there’s a lot more detail in this one). The ideas seem trite and obvious when presented in this format, but it’s rather how well the ideas sink in to the person – and I think a few, such as identifying the most valuable chunks of time and reserving it for important tasks or aiming at a result instead of listing to-dos did sink in very well with me.
As with all management and self-help books I know, the ideas are simple and therefore the book’s purpose is instead to act as a medium by which simple ideas sink in better. The ideas that sunk in with this was a mix of looking at how I spend time, and how much is contributed with that time. Meetings where I sometimes find myself stupidly smiling and waving like a certain penguin are pruned from the schedule – and now, I reserve my most efficient times: morning (10am – 11:30am) and post-nap (4:30pm – 6pm), to focus in on the most important, and often hardest work, leaving the rest of the time for less pressing, less important work or meetings. So in a day, I only have about 3 hours of this most effective time, and managing where it’s spent does the most for whatever contribution I have planned. And, in evaluating priorities, the criteria becomes simplified to either the growing and retaining users (in the context of my startup) and contribution is whether each priority does either, and to what extent. At the end it’s still a decision, still an imperfect judgment, but having simple criteria makes the decision a lot less of a multi-dimensional headache to think about.
% grep -i "the effective executive" quotes.txt6 matches
on choosing people
“The time quantum of the good personnel decision is amazingly large. What the decision involves often becomes clear only when one has gone around the same track several times”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
on initiative
“Executives are forced to keep on ‘operating’ unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
on effective work
“Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Nor is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
on organization
“The test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
on organization
“Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. Too many meetings signify that work that should be in one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and that information is not addressed to the people who need it”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive
on diversity
“To tolerate diversity, relationships must be task-focused rather than personality-focused”
— Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive