Being The Effective Executive

“Getting The Right Things Done”, is the key takeaway from the book “The Effective Executive” by Peter F. Drucker. By the right thing the author refers to being effective and not just tackling through urgent tasks that comes on the way. Effectiveness can be learned is the second premise. The book has therefore tried to present the various dimensions of executive performance in such sequence as to simulate readers to learn for themselves how to become effective executives. Effectiveness reveals itself as crucial to a man’s self-development; to organization development; and to the fulfillment and viability of modern society.

1. The first step toward effectiveness is a procedure: recording where the time goes. The executive need not even do this himself; it is better done by a secretary or assistant. Yet if this is all the executive ever does, he will reap a substantial improvement. The analysis of the executive’s time, the elimination of the unnecessary time-wasters, already requires some action. It requires some elementary decisions. It requires some changes in man’s behavior, his relationships, and his concerns.
2. The next stop, however, in which the executive is asked to focus his vision on contribution advances from the procedural to the conceptual, from mechanics to analysis, and from efficiencies to concern with results. In this step the executive disciplines himself to think through the reason why he is on the payroll and the contribution he ought to make.
3. Making strengths productive is fundamentally an attitude expressed in behavior. It is fundamentally respect for the person – one’s own as well as others. It is a value system in action. But it is again “learning through doing” and self-development through practice. In making strengths productive, the executive integrates individual purpose and organization needs, individual capacity and organization results, individual achievement and organization opportunity.
4. “First Things First“, no longer deals with a resource, time, but with the end product, the performance of organization and executive. What is being recorded and analyzed is no longer what happens to us but what we should try to make happen in the environment around us. And what is being developed here is not information, but character: foresight, self-reliance, courage.
5. The effective decision, which the final chapters discuss, is concerned with rational action. There is no longer a broad and clearly marked path which the executive only has to walk down to gain effectiveness. But there are still clear surveyor’s benchmarks to give orientation and guidance how to get from one to the next. How the executive, for instance, is to move from identifying a pattern of events as constituting a generic problem to the setting of the boundary conditions which the decision has to satisfy, is not spelled out. What needs to be done and in what sequence should be clear enough. In following these benchmarks, the executive, it is expected, will develop and train himself in responsible judgement. Effective decision-making requires both procedure and analysis, but its essence is an ethics of action.

There is much more to the self-development of an executive than his training in effectiveness. He has to acquire knowledges and skills. He has to learn a good many new work habits as he proceeds along his career, and he will occasionally have to unlearn some old work habits. But knowledges, skills, and habits, no matter how accomplished, will avail the executive little unless he first develops himself in effectiveness.

There is nothing exalted about being an effective executive. It is simply doing one’s job like thousands of others. There are surely higher goals for a man’s life than to become an effective executive. But only because the goal is so modest can we hope at all to achieve it; that is, to have the large number of effective executives modern society and its organizations need.

Self-development of the effective executive is central to the development of the organization, whether it be a business, a government agency, a research laboratory, a hospital, or a military service. It is the way toward performance of the organization. As executives work toward becoming effective, they raise the performance level of the whole organization. They raise the sights of people – their own as well as others.

But executive effectiveness is surely one of the basic requirements of effective organization and in itself a most important contribution toward organization development. Executive effectiveness is our one best hope to make modern society productive economically and viable