Effective Management

The Effective Executive

Peter Drucker

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There are many good reasons why Peter Drucker is looked on as the father of modern management theory and practice. Plenty are on display in this classic book. It’s packed full of sharp insights and no-nonsense advice for executives about how to maximise their impact and become more successful business managers.

 

The Effective Executive isn’t a dry, theoretical book – the author includes practical examples drawn from a range of settings. The C-suite features prominently, but Drucker casts his net wider to capture the wisdom of great leaders from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt.

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On the book’s central subject, Drucker’s key argument is that:

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• An executive’s job is to be effective

• Effectiveness is a skill that can be learned

 

What does Drucker believe executives must do to make themselves effective? He organises his book around five major topics.

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1.  Manage your time

 

“Do not start with your tasks, start with your time.”

 

Drucker regards time as the key limiting resource for modern executives. He urges readers to record how they spend their time, ruthlessly cut or delegate less valuable activities and consolidate what remains into chunks that are large enough to accomplish results.

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When he castigates multi-tasking and praises time-blocking he is anticipating modern thinking by decades. His list of pointless ‘busyness’ activities describes some modern workplaces to perfection.

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2.  Focus on the contribution you make, not the effort you put in

 

The ability of most modern knowledge workers to create value rests on them being specialists not generalists. Yet to make their skill valuable they must look beyond their own narrow perspective and apply it to advance the success of their colleagues, their superiors and the wider firm.

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For this reason Drucker urges managers to look up and outwards to identify what they can contribute to their organisation. Yet he sees too many managers looking down and inwards, trapped by a focus on role and process.

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For the author, a focus on contribution is also the enabler of good executive relationships:

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“Executives in an organisation do not have good human relations because they have a ‘talent for people’. They have good human relations because they focus on contribution in their own work and in their relationships with others.”

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3.  Staff your organisation for strength

 

Drucker laments that many businesses don’t ‘staff for strength’. He argues that managers hire and promote to fill empty roles instead of to populate their organisation with talented people. In doing so, companies fall into the trap of choosing people who fit their open roles least badly.

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That’s not a recipe for outperformance. If you take staffing decisions to avoid weakness, you’ll just obtain mediocrity.

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Yet businesses clearly can’t design each role around the most talented person available. To address this conundrum, Drucker provides a few suggestions:

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• Make the effort to build a proper talent pipeline. That will give you the best chance of having strong candidates available who are an acceptable match for new roles as they come up.

• Make jobs big and demanding to extract the maximum benefit from your people’s strengths.

• Accept that nobody has only strengths – even the most talented people have weaknesses. The trick is to employ talented people within an organisation that makes the best use of their skills.

 

4.   Set the right priorities

 

Drucker argues that “effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time”:

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• It’s crucial to focus – to concentrate your efforts on what matters most. There are always more important things to do than there is time available to do them. Prioritising is vital.

• The major initiatives that can really make a difference to your organisation are also the things that require big, continuous chunks of time to complete them.

 

How to make space for those big, important initiatives?

 

“The first rule for the concentration of executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be productive”.

 

Drucker urges managers to take the difficult decision to terminate activities that worked in the past but are unlikely to work in the future before those activities start to fail. Ask yourself: if we didn’t do this already, would we start doing it now? If you wouldn’t, stop doing it. Otherwise you’ll invest precious resources in a futile effort to sustain activities that are in long-term decline.

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Here are Drucker’s rules for setting priorities, which are about courage as much as analysis:

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• Pick the future over the past.

• Focus on opportunities rather than problems.

• Choose your own direction rather than climb on a bandwagon.

• Aim high for something that will really make a difference rather than for something that is safe and easy to do.

 

5.   Tie everything together with effective decision-making

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What does effective decision-making consist of? Drucker again has a few pithy suggestions:

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• Don’t take lots of decisions. Concentrate on a few important ones and get them right.

• Think at the strategic/ generic level rather than at the level of granular problems. Problems often appear idiosyncratic when thoughtful analysis can reveal that they’re systemic. In this case, effective treatment of the underlying cause must involve a rule, a policy or a principle.

• It’s important to be decisive and not dither, but speed is not the most important virtue in decision-making. And deciding to do nothing is sometimes the right option.

 

Conclusion

 

By now you may have realised that this book was published a long time ago. In 1967 actually. Why review such an old book? Surely it’s out of date by now?

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Not at all. Many things have changed since 1967, but the principles of effective management haven’t. In fact, it’s remarkable how contemporary much of the book feels.

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For example, Drucker believes the advent of the knowledge economy requires organisations to develop a wholly new management model that devolves authority down the chain of command, in contrast to firms based on manual work that could operate using top-down, command and control methods.

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This poses wholly new challenges for managers. How to make the best use of knowledge workers is a theme running through the book. It’s a problem that some organisations are still striving to crack more than 50 years later.

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Drucker’s language and case studies reflect the era in which he was writing. There are no women in his world for example, only men. That grates after a while. But if you can get past the non-inclusive language, which he’d surely change if he were writing today, the book is packed with insight.

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And at just 144 pages it doesn’t even take long to read.