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The Effective Executive (Paperback)
by Peter F. Drucker
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Management, Leadership, Business |
| Market price: ¥ 180.00
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A required reading for all managers and a perfect manual to help you improve your executive effectiveness. |
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Author: Peter F. Drucker
Publisher: Collins; Revised edition
Pub. in: January, 2006
ISBN: 0060833459
Pages: 208
Measurements: 7.9 x 5.9 x 0.5 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00051
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the most important books on leadership to date. |
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- MSL Picks -
Peter Drucker died on November 11, 2005 at the age of 95. His life and work spanned sixty years and he left behind a body of knowledge and ideas that continue to influence all knowledge workers today. In this book he demonstrates an uncanny ability to see organizations in all their complexity and reduce management problems to their essentials. Like a virtuoso musician, he rarely hits a wrong note, and each idea blends flawlessly with the next. He provides a complete model for management effectiveness that is theoretically sound and solidly based on his experience. This is perhaps the most useful of his 38 books and distills a lifetime of management consulting into a few concise lessons that get to the root of what managers need to do. It provides a complete course in management in a thin book of just 192 pages.
Drucker starts by arguing that all knowledge workers are executives and that effectiveness should be defined as "getting the right things done." He develops his ideas from real experience, supporting them using real-life stories of successes and failures taken from business and politics. He structures the book around five essential practices, which he found all effective managers have in common: 1) track where your time goes; 2) focus on your outward contribution; 3) build on strengths (yours and others'); 4) do first things first; and 5) perhaps most interesting and least intuitive - follow a decision-making process that builds on opinions and encourages dissent.
In elaborating these five essential practices, Drucker presents many insightful findings. However, what is most impressive about the book is not any particular idea or piece of advice, but how his many ideas are tied together into a coherent whole, leading to practical advice on how to do things better.
My own experience of the last 30 years indicates that, in spite of much thought and many advances, management has not improved greatly in the past 100 years. Drucker's lessons haven't got passed on to individual managers in the organizations in which I've worked. These were mostly managed by untrained and inexperienced executives and demonstrated typical levels of dysfunction. In large companies, small companies, failed startup companies, failed acquisitions of entrepreneurial companies by larger companies and failed business reengineering efforts, I've experienced many examples of Drucker's advice not being followed - including all of the following:
- Managers who consistently spent too much time managing crises and left important work undone
- Culture that evolved into a culture of fear and blame, where heroes were worshipped and winners took all the rewards
- Poor, hasty decisions that were made by high level executives based on insufficient information
- Banishment of dissent and an unwritten policy of "don't ask, don't tell"
Could these failures have been avoided or is managing just too hard? Drucker's criteria for effective management are simple, but not easily followed. Drucker points out that executives tend towards ineffectiveness unless they put energy into the five practices. Although people don't set out to be bad managers, I've frequently seen good people rendered ineffective by the burden of impossible jobs, by mindless assumptions that could not be disputed, and by decisions that could not be questioned. The drive and energy needed to fix this has to come from an extraordinary and dedicated leader - and this rarely happens. In the same way that entropy dictates that natural systems tend towards disorder, the natural order of organizations dictates that energy drains out of companies and their managers until they become dysfunctional. Hence the frequent rise and fall of our organizations, which are a microcosm for the rise and fall of our nations and civilizations.
It would be hard to read this book and not gain from the experience, but although Drucker was a journalist and his writing is lucid and well- structured, his old-fashioned style makes his book less easy to read than it might be. Also, Drucker's ego sometimes gets in the way. For example, he rarely acknowledges his influences, and when he does, it's usually people he consulted with, like Alfred Sloan, Jr of General Motors, from whom he can claim credit by association. He appears to come up with his huge fund of ideas as if from thin air. This is unfortunate, because there would be great value in understanding where his ideas came from and their links to the ideas of like-minded experts in related areas of thought. For example, one aspect of executive effectiveness that is strikingly missing from his model is motivation. Drucker doesn't address what drives people to excellence and how managers can motivate others.
Drucker may have passed on, but his ideas have not. Minor criticisms aside, this could be the only book you need on your path to becoming a better manager. As Drucker says, "Self-development of the executive toward effectiveness is the only available answer. It is the only way in which organization goals and individual needs can come together." Effectiveness can be learned and the five habits are a good place to start. Certainly Drucker's ideas could be worked into any training program and his book provides the material for a life-time's work of self-improvement. You will learn a great deal by simply reading the book and relating it to your experience and it may inspire you to make some significant changes in the way you do your work. (From quoting Graham Lawes, USA)
Target readers:
Executives, managers, entrepreneurs, government, military or nonprofit leaders, professionals, and MBAs
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Peter F. Drucker was considered one of management's top thinkers. As the author of more than 35 books, his ideas have had an enormous impact on shaping the modern corporation. In 2002, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. During his lifetime, Drucker was a writer, teacher, philosopher, reporter, consultant, and professor at the Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.
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From the Publisher:
Peter Drucker is a highly regarded consultant and prolific writer in the sphere of management and leadership. His classic 1966 work, The Effective Executive, emphasizes the importance of focusing the executive's work load to avoid "wasting time" on non-essential matters.
Drucker's five-part effectiveness model depends heavily on listening ability, particularly steps one, two, and five.
Drucker's step one, choosing how to spend and not to spend time, requires aggressive delegation in order to avoid spending time on peripheral matters. Although he doesn't say it in as many words, it's implicit that Drucker's vision of delegation relies on a coaching management style - essentially, periodic listening as subordinates describe their planning and progress - because a direct-control style of management would negate the executive's decision not to spend time on delegated projects.
In step two of Drucker's model, executives ask both themselves and their subordinates what they contribute now to the organization and what they could contribute in the future. According to Drucker regardless of whether an individual's view of what they now contribute, or could contribute, matches their manager's view, bringing out and stressing the importance of everyone's role as a contributor is essential to the organization's overall effectiveness. (The same general principle is embodied by Covey’s and Goleman’s emphasis on self-awareness, as in listening to one's self, and being aware of others, as in listening to subordinates.)
In step five, Drucker emphasizes the importance to the executive of actively seeking competing opinions and inquiring about the basis for those opinions before choosing a course of action, rather than acting on the basis of pre-arranged or tacit consensus. Of necessity, this requires consistently listening with genuine curiosity in order to encourage development of diverse opinions and supporting rationales, rather than simply setting forth proposals and working to build consensus around them.
In conclusion, executives can, and must learn 5 practices essential to business effectiveness:
- Management of time
- Choosing what to contribute to a practical organization
- Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for the best effect
- Setting up the right priorities
- And knitting all of them together with effective decision making
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Effectiveness Can Be Learned .To be effective is the job of the executive. "To effect" and "to execute" are, after all, near-synonyms. Whether he works in a business or in a hospital, in a government agency or in a labor union, in a university or in the army, the executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply that he is expected to be effective.
Yet men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs. High intelligence is common enough among executives. Imagination is far from rare. The level of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little correlation between a man's effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective plodders. While others rush around in the frenzy and busyness which very bright people so often confuse with "creativity," the plodder puts one foot in front of the other and gets there like the tortoise in the old fable.
Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.
Why We Need Effective Executives? All this should be obvious. But why then has so little attention been paid to effectiveness, in an age in which there are mountains of books and articles on every other aspect of the executive's tasks?
One reason for this neglect is that effectiveness is the specific technology of the knowledge worker within an organization. Until recently, there was no more than a handful of these around.
For manual work, we need only efficiency; that is, the ability to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things done. The manual worker can always be judged in terms of the quantity and quality of a definable and discrete output, such as a pair of shoes. We have learned how to measure efficiency and how to define quality in manual work during the last hundred years-to the point where we have been able to multiply the output of the individual worker tremendously.
Formerly, the manual worker-whether machine operator or front-line soldier-predominated in an organizations. Few people of effectiveness were needed: those at the top who gave the orders that others carried out. They were so small a fraction of the total work population that we could, rightly or wrongly, take their effectiveness for granted. We could depend on the supply of "naturals," the few people in any area of human endeavor who somehow know what the rest of us have to learn the hard way.
This was true not only of business and the army. It is hard to realize today that "government" during the American Civil War a hundred years ago meant the merest handful of people. Lincoln's Secretary of War had fewer than fifty civilian subordinates, most of them not "executives' and policy-makers but telegraph clerks. The entire Washington establishment of the U.S. government in Theodore Roosevelt's time, around 1900, could be comfortably housed in any one of the government buildings along the Mall today.
The hospital of yesterday did not know any of the "health-service professionals," the X-ray and lab technicians, the dieticians and therapists, the social workers, and so on, of whom it now employs as many as two hundred and fifty for every one hundred patients. Apart from a few nurses, there were only cleaning women, cooks and maids. The physician was the knowledge worker, with the nurse as his aide.
In other words, up to recent times, the major problem of organization was efficiency in the performance of the manual worker who did what he had been told to do. Knowledge workers were not predominant in organization.
In fact, only a small fraction of the knowledge workers of earlier days were part of an organization. Most of them worked by themselves as professionals, at best with a clerk. Their effectiveness or lack of effectiveness concerned only themselves and affected only themselves.
Today, however, the large knowledge organization is the central reality. Modem society is a society of large organized institutions. In every one of them, including the armed services, the center of gravity has shifted to the knowledge worker, the man who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands. Increasingly, the majority of people who have been schooled to use knowledge, theory, and concept rather than physical force or manual skill work in an organization and are effective insofar as they can make a contribution to the organization.
Now effectiveness can no longer be taken for granted. Now it can no longer be neglected.
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Wall Street Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
The dean of this country's business and management philosophers. |
Christian Science Monitor (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
An imaginative book, arguing, for instance, for reliance on intuitions rather than 'facts'...a survival manual on how to escape organization traps. |
An American reader (MSL quote), USA
<2006-12-27 00:00>
This is a superbly written guide for executives regarding how to become more effective. After reading this book, I adopted several suggestions that Drucker made and I must say that the results have been quite dramatic. For instance, I was able to cut down unproductive meetings considerably by eliminating things like "no meetings without a clear agenda." Common sense but rarely followed in the corporate world. |
Gregory McMahan (MSL quote), Japan
<2006-12-27 00:00>
I always learn a lot from Drucker. Every single book he has written has become a classic in its own right, with basic prescriptions for many problems one often comes across in business and in life. Although his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship is my all-time favorite, The Effective Executive, at least for me, is a very close second.
Drucker starts by defining who and what the executive is, and places him (and increasingly her) in the most appropriate context. He is very careful to distinguish the executive from the more typical laborer. Essentially, Drucker tells us that the executive is someone who is paid for what he or she knows, and not what he or she does. The executive is supposed to know, for any situation, the following: what is the right thing to do, how to do it, and how to do it effectively. Once this is identified, the executive has to make certain that those who do the right thing can do it well. That is essentially the difference between management and labor.
Some executives do manage and supervise, as these terms are traditionally used, but an executive has to do more than this. He or she has to identify problems and opportunities, and in the case of problems, solve them, while in the case of opportunities, marshal all available resources to pursue them. While decision-making is part of the executive's domain, it is what goes into the decision-making that is critical. The real task of the executive is to think, make judgments, take focused action and ultimately bear the consequences of his or her actions. In too many institutions, whether they are universities, corporations or government agencies, this action chain often breaks down, typically at the first step. More often than not, however, actions are de-coupled from (bearing) the consequences. As a result, Drucker spends a lot of time going over what it means to be an Effective Executive, as opposed to one of the many hangers-on who merely treads water and tries to curry favor through flattery, subterfuge or other devious and unsavory methods.
Drucker, I believe, is very likely the first to make the important distinction between effort and results. Lots of people work hard, put in long hours on the job, yet have nothing to show for their effort. Many will advance in rank and pay, but not based on merit, for they will get their promotions and pay raises based on time served. Results are the end-product of effort- be it large or small, but effort, no matter how great or how dedicated, does not necessarily lead to results, issues of what constitutes 'results' (or even 'effort') aside. This is why Drucker admonishes one to occupy himself or herself with results, and not efforts. That said, Drucker emphasizes that every executive looking to be a better executive should spend a little time thinking about where his or her most important resource- time, goes.
Speaking of resources, Drucker also states that the two most important resources in any organization are knowledge and time. Painful experience forces me to agree with his assertion. The two once combined can equal favorable and positive results, if combined properly. However, both of these resources have to be put to work through an organization, and with the assistance of other (hopefully like-minded) people. The danger here is not that knowledge and time will be misapplied, but that first, knowledge within an organization will go unutilized and second that some knowledge, such as that internal to the organization, will take precedence over the information and knowledge coming from the outside. Too many institutions have grown stale simply because they have consciously chosen to emphasize what is going on inside the organization than what is occurring on the outside, and acting upon it. Once again, painful experience forces me to agree with this brilliant insight.
However, Drucker also points out that information and knowledge exist pretty much outside of the organization, and for this he gets my undying respect. People are the source of all knowledge, and in the global economy, people are mobile, so all knowledge, to some extent, will also be mobile. An institution's success or failure then hinges on what comes through and walks out of the door every day. This valuable insight ties into Drucker's last admonishment- focus on contribution. Every executive should ask: 'What can I contribute of value?'; however, this question should be considered well within the context of the organization. Yet again, painful experience forces me to admit that many institutions have specifically organized themselves so as not to have its personnel contribute something of value, no matter what their mission statements profess. In such situations, it is best for the effective executive or those wishing to become effective executives to part ways with such an institution.
But fear not, while the book is a thinly veiled extended lecture on the importance of competence and good judgment in business relations, these things can be learned. The path to becomig an effective executive demands some tribute upon the Altar of Bad Experience, but as for the rest, you can acquire it through careful study of history, anecdotal experience and the exercise of a few simple habits to be found in the book. As Will Rogers once said, "Good judgment comes from experience. And a lot of experience comes from bad judgment."
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