The Effective Executive

I read a good number of Peter F. Drucker’s works as a postgraduate student. During the last few years, I browsed some passages on and off as the need arose. Last month, I was traveling and had the good fortune to have the company of his The Effective Executive during my Eurostar rides. Coincidentally, I met some extraordinarily smart quantum physicists and recommended Drucker’s writings to them. Deep down, I wish I could summarize all his works, but feel frustrated and powerless that I cannot possibly do Drucker the justice, hence I have to resort to suggesting that people read his writings.

The Effective Executive was first published in 1966. It advises on how to manage oneself for effectiveness. To me, it is one of the very best of his dozens of books. In his own words:

it is both a concise blueprint for effectiveness as an executive within an organization and a practical guide to managing oneself for performance and achievement, whether within an organization or on one’s own. It is equally the best introduction for the nonmanager – whether student or layman – to management and organizations.

Drucker argues that being intelligent or working hard or being knowledgeable is not sufficient for an individual to be reasonably effective, also to be effective does not require any special gifts or training. To be effective is to consistently follow a set of practices. This book prescribes these practices. He states that only effectiveness can convert the essential resources such as intelligence, imagination and knowledge into results. The traditional yardsticks used for manual work are not applicable to knowledge work. A knowledge worker needs a different kind of management and leadership, not to be supervised closely, instead to be helped. As a knowledge worker, one must direct oneself towards performance and contribution.

I like Drucker’s definition of an executive:

Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of an organization to perform and to obtain results. This may be the capacity of a business to bring out a new product or to obtain a larger share of a given market. It may be the capacity of a hospital to provide bedside care to its patients, and so on. Such a man must make decisions; he cannot just carry out orders. He must take responsibility for his contribution. And he is supposed, by virtue of his knowledge, to be better equipped to make the right decision than anyone else. He may be overridden; he may be demoted or fired. But so long as he has the job, the goals, the standards, and the contribution are in his keeping.   

Entering the industry, as I started to build and lead a team in a company, I appreciated more of what I learned from Drucker. It is one of the sources that guides me to a firm belief that as a leader, the responsibility is always mine. To be a good leader requires far more than technical expertise and intelligence. In my view, partially thanks to Silicon Valley, the individual contributors are valued more than in the past when the management ladder was the only way for career progress. At the same time, I wonder whether we have neglected leadership development in the tech industry under the disguise of needing more technical experts tackling specific problem sets. Many brilliant engineers are very settled down thinking that, as life is wonderful enough as an individual contributor, why bother taking up the work coordinating and leading efforts of multiple people, let alone sometimes having to deal with tough conversations with difficult employees. I respect people with this view, but disagree profoundly. The Effective Executive broadly addresses any knowledge worker who is responsible for actions and decisions to contribute to the performance capacity of the wide organization. So you may find a sentence or two beneficial to your thinking, regardless of whether you view yourself as an executive or one who never wants to be.

Below I summarize the book with selected passages below to show what Drucker prescribed for learning to be effective.

Effectiveness is not a subject, but a self-discipline. Throughout this book, and implicit in its structure and in the way it treats its subject matter, is always the question: “What makes for effectiveness in an organization and in any of the major areas of an executive’s day and work?” Only rarely is the question asked: “Why should there be effectiveness?” The goal of effectiveness is taken for granted…..Effectiveness reveals itself as crucial to a man’s self-development; to organisation development; and to the fulfillment and viability of modern society.

1. The first step toward effectiveness is a procedure: recording where the time goes.
2. The next step 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….In focusing himself and his vision on contribution the executive has to think through purpose and ends rather than means alone.
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 thing first. It is an antiphon to Know Thy Time at the first step. The procedure here no longer deals with a resource, time, but with the end product, the performance of organisation 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. What is being developed here, in other words, is leadership – not the leadership of brilliance and genius, to be sure, but the much more modest yet more enduring leadership of dedication, determination, and serious purpose.
5. The effective decision does not, as so many texts on decision making proclaim, flow from a consensus on the facts. The understanding that underlies the right decision grows out of the clash and conflict of divergent opinions and out of the serious consideration of competing alternatives.

As conflict is one of my favorite subjects, I shall indulge myself with a bit more quotes from the book here:

Disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination. In all matters of true uncertainty such as the executive deals with – whether his sphere is political, economic, social, or military – one needs “creative” solutions which create a new situation. And this means that one needs imagination – a new and different way of perceiving and understanding.

Imagination of the first order is, I admit, not in abundant supply. But neither is it as scarce as is commonly believed. Imagination needs to be challenged and stimulated, however, or else it remains latent and unused. Disagreement, especially if forced to be reasoned, thought through, documented, is the most effective stimulus we know.

Disagreement converts the plausible into the right, the right into the good decision.

Effective executive starts out with the commitment to find out why people disagree. Effective executives know, of course, that there are fools around and that there are mischief-makers. But they do not assume that the man who disagrees with what they themselves see as clear and obvious is, therefore, either a fool or a knave. They know that unless proven otherwise, the dissenter has to be assumed to be reasonably intelligent and reasonably fair-minded. Therefore, it has to be assumed that he has reached his so obviously wrong conclusion because he sees a different reality and is concerned with a different problem. The effective executive, therefore, always asks: ”What does this fellow have to see if his position were, after all, tenable, rational, intelligent?” The effective executive is concerned first with understanding. Only then does he even think about who is right and who is wrong.