By Peter Drucker
Plain and simple, The Effective Executive needs to be a member of my "Read It Once A Year" club. Written more than fifty years ago, Drucker is still the mentor I want coaching me on how to improve my leadership.
What is the book about?
As Drucker notes in his first two lines: "Management books usually deal with managing other people. The subject of this book is managing ones self for effectiveness." The Effective Executive will help you by focusing on acquiring five habits:
1. Knowing where your time goes.
2. Focusing on your best contributions.
3. Building on your strengths and those of others.
4. Concentrating on "first things" and doing one thing at a time.
5. Making effective decisions.
My Top Ten Takeaways:
1. Focus on opportunities not problems:
Staff for opportunities, not problems (p. 89). Leaders must make sure problems don't overwhelm opportunities.
2. Pause monthly to assess where my time goes:
That sounds simple enough. It is not. The higher up in the organization one travels, the more demands are made on one's time. Don't allow meetings to dominate one's time. Maximize time by working in time blocks (e.g. deep work at 90 minute intervals; working a day a week at home).
3. Focus on contribution:
Drucker writes, "The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward his goals. He asks: 'What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?" His stress is on responsibility" (52). To use the words of Andy Stanley, "Only do what only you can do." I must set aside time on a monthly basis to evaluate my contribution so my efforts don't go sideways. Focusing on contributions will lead to communication, teamwork, self-development, and developing others.
4. Focus on my strengths -- and the strengths of others:
Ask: "What are the things that I seem to be able to do with relative ease, while they come rather hard to other people?" (97). Drucker says that in focusing on strengths you will have to put up with weakness. To focus on weakness, you will never get the payoff of strengths. Lee refused to fire a general who frustrated him more than once by disregarding orders . . . because "he performs." Drucker writes, "No executive has ever suffered because his subordinates were strong and effective" (73).
5. Embrace diverse people and styles or you will "lack the ability to change and the ability for dissent which the right decision demands": (77).
6. Key "strengths appraisals" include four questions:
(1) What has he [or she] done well?
(2) What, therefore, is he likely to be able to do well?
(3) What does he have to learn or to acquire to be able to get the full benefit from his strength?
(4) If I had a son or daughter, would I be willing to have him or her work under this person? (a) If yes, why? (b) If no, why?
7. If there is any one "secret" of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time (100). Single-minded concentration is the secret of those who get many things done (103). Doing first things means "slough off the past that has ceased to be productive." Don't bail out the past! "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." (112).
8. It takes courage to go after opportunities instead of massaging the past.
9. To make decisions is the specific executive task." (112). When it comes to decisions, think "strategic" not "problem solving."
10. Disagreement can be one of the best tools in a leader's toolbox provided the leader embraces its importance and knows how to utilize it (155).
Drucker gems:
About time: "Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time" (26). "It is amazing how many things busy people are doing that never will be missed" (36).
About crisis: "A recurrent crisis should always have been foreseen" (41).
About contribution: "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, not matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, 'top management.' He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole" (53).
About focusing on and building the strengths of others:Andrew Carnegie's tombstone: "Here lies a man who knew how to bring into his service men better than he was himself" (73).
About contributions of others "All one can measure is performance" (86). Hire and measure performance, not potential.
About hiring: "Does this person have strength in one major area? And is this strength relevant to the task? If he achieves excellence in this one area, will it make a significant difference?" And if the answer is "yes," he will go ahead and appoint the man (88).
About the past: "Yesterday's successes always linger on long beyond their productive life" (105). Prune, and prune ruthlessly.
About getting stuck in the past: "One of the most obvious facts of social and political life is the longevity of the temporary" (129). Meaning . . . letting a "temporary" program develop into an "eternal" program . . . refusing to prune or eliminate the old.
About turning decisions into action: Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: (1) Who has to know of this decision? (2) What action has to be taken? (3) Who is to take it? (4) And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked--with dire results (136).
Which edition should I purchase?
I have this book in hardback, paperback, Kindle, and Audible. I have older versions and the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition. My encouragement is to buy the newer versions. They include the introductory chapter, "What Makes an Effective Executive?" The fiftieth anniversary edition also includes an introductory note by Jim Collins.