The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
One Sentence Summary: An executive – one who makes decisions that affect your business – must be effective, that is, he must do what it takes; this book teaches us to do that, by teaching us to learn how to watch our time and to organize it, to ask ourselves about what we contribute rather than what is owed to us, to nurture the energy in ourselves and in others by focusing on strengths rather than weaknesses, concentrating on priorities by trimming the past and having the courage – rather than the intelligence – to determine what they are, making effective decisions based on 5 basic principles, and to understand that every choice has alternatives.
By Peter F. Drucker, 160 pages, 1967 (first edition), 2002 (second revised edition).
Résumé et chronique du livre :
The Effective Executive is the first in my crazy Personal MBA challenge written by Peter Drucker, renowned management specialist and theorist and classic among classics. It is also the very first book of his that I have read. The author begins by explaining to us that efficiency is the primary function of executives. Being efficient is simply doing what is necessary. Effective men are scarce in management positions, and it seems that there is no correlation between a person’s effectiveness and their intelligence, their imagination and their knowledge. These qualities are certainly essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.
For a long time, the strength of a nation, an enterprise, or an institution was more assured in its manual labor force than by the effectiveness of its intellectuals. Yesterday’s hospital did not have the specialists, technicians, chemists, physiotherapists, dietitians and assistants who are the norm today. Today, the proportion of intellectuals in institutions and companies in relation to manual workers is enormous. These intellectuals are experts in many disciplines whose training has cost an enormous amount, and who produce nothing by themselves. The specialist only produces knowledge, ideas and information. Therefore he can’t put the intrinsic value of his product into practical use, as he would if he was making a pair of shoes, for example, and he must produce efficiently.
The key to efficiency for an executive is to apply his effort where it is necessary. An executive is a specialist who bears the responsibility of contributing to the operation or results of a company. Many members of the hierarchy are not real executives, because even though they have the power of command over – sometimes many – people, they provide no real contribution to the operation of the company. Executives are people who make decisions that have a significant impact on the company. Thus, a businessman or a self-employed worker is an executive.
Executives today are subject to major four constraints:
- An executive’s time is less and less his own.
Everyone can take their time and nobody denies it to them. Even the most organized executives find that most of their time is taken up by interruptions from people who provide minimal or no contribution to the goals they pursue.
- Executives are forced to do menial tasks that do not change the environment in which they live and work.
If an executive stops caring, over time, to determine what he must do, he is condemned to remain stuck doing something and can’t step back from it. Executives need criteria that allow them to work according to what is truly important, that is, their contribution to the results.
- Executives act at the heart of an organization.
They are therefore effective only if others make use of their contributions.
- Executives act on the inside of an organization.
It’s on the inside of the company that we see executives, and it is there that they have close contact. They see the problems that arise first hand, the relationships that are formed there, the oppositions that develop there, rumors that spread there.
So, the performance of an organization can be determined mainly by external results, and it is the outside that often has the largest influence on the company. It may have indicators in the form of figures and statistics, that can easily be presented in the form of beautiful graphics in this age of information processing, but the important events that are passed to the outside can’t be put into a computer. We need the power of the human brain – though not particularly logical – to understand this information.
The danger, then, is that executives come to despise the information and stimuli that can not be reduced to the status of electronic language or logic. Unless they make serious efforts to understand what is happening outside, the inside of the organization can hide what is really going on.
There are techniques and habits to increase the effectiveness of each of these constraints, which I have summarized for you:
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