The Effective Executive: Review, Notes & Quotes

My Thoughts

Peter Drucker’s appeal to step back and focus on getting the right things done, provides a nice contrasting message in our era of endless hustling. Production comes not from outputting a high quantity of tasks, but on ensuring the few vitally important things get done, and get done well.

While it’s easy to mistake activity for progress, The Effective Executive, can help you to ensure your efforts will actually lead to results.

By the end of this book here are a few of the key things you’ll have learned:

• How time logs can help you recapture poorly used time
• How questions about contribution can naturally lead your self-development efforts
• Why focusing on your strengths is more important than being well-rounded (and the 1 exception)
• Why the best executives make the fewest decisions
• How to refine your decision making process

Overall, I feel this book is well worth reading at least once. Yes many of the anecdotes in this book are outdated, but there’s a reason this book is a classic. Look past the dry parts of this book, and you’ll find timeless content and at least one tip that’ll help you become more effective in your own life.

• “Count your time, and make it count.”
  

• “A written plan should anticipate the need for flexibility.”

• “The motivation of the knowledge worker depends on his being effective; on his being able to achieve. If effectiveness is lacking in his work, his commitment to work and to contribution will soon wither and he’ll become a time server going through the motions from 9-5.”

• “Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks there are valleys and no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of human knowledge, experience, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to be rated a total failure. There is no such thing as a good man. Good for what is the question.”

• “The assertion that somebody else will not let me do anything should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia. But even where the situation does set limitations and everyone lives and works in rather stringent limitations, there are usually important, meaningful, pertinent things that can be done.”

• “The effective executive doesn’t need to make many decisions because he solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule, that is by adaptation.”

• “Organizations are not more effective because they have better people. They have better people because they motivate to self-development through their standards, through their habits, through their climate, and these in turn result from systematic, focused, purposeful self-training of the individuals in becoming effective executives.”

• Only focus on eradicating weaknesses that impede you from reaching your potential in your area of expertise.

• People who hold the most productive meetings often spend more time on the preparation than on the meeting itself.

• Drucker suggests effective executives practice 5 key habits:
  1. They know where their time goes.
  2. They focus on outward contribution meaning the results that need to be produced rather than specific techniques or tools.
  3. They build on strengths.
  4. They concentrate on areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They know that doing things that aren’t worthy of being prioritized is about as good as doing nothing all.
  5. They make effective decisions.

• You can only effectively manage your time if you’ve accurately recorded (not recalled from memory) how you usually spend your time.

• Recurrent crises should be foreseen and accounted for to an extent such that they become routine problems. By definition, problems that are routine could have been solved once by an executive and then have a systemized solution developed such that a clerk or other lower level employee could then handle future occurrences of said issue.

• Effective personal development plans arise naturally from asking oneself how one can evolve to best contribute to one’s organization. More specifically, “What skills strengths, and knowledge do I need to acquire, and what standards do I need to hold myself to in order to make the greatest contribution possible?”

• Making your superior more effective will often make yourself more effective and improve your work environment.

• The primary responsibility of an executive isn’t to change human beings, but rather to put them in positions where there strengths and ambitions will lead to them being successful.