The Effective Executive

Effectiveness—doing the right things well—is not an inborn trait but a learnable set of habits that any knowledge worker can master to convert intelligence, knowledge, and ability into results.

Peter Drucker's classic argues that in a society of large knowledge organizations, the scarce and decisive resource is the effective executive—defined not by rank but by responsibility for contributions that materially affect performance. Drawing on decades of consulting with executives across business, government, hospitals, universities, and the military, Drucker demonstrates that effectiveness bears no relation to intelligence, imagination, or knowledge, and that even brilliant people are often strikingly ineffectual. Instead, effectiveness is a complex of five learnable practices: managing time, focusing on outward contribution, building on strengths, concentrating on the few things that matter, and making sound decisions. With vivid case studies—Vail at Bell, Sloan at GM, Marshall's staffing genius, Lincoln's choice of Grant—Drucker offers a self-discipline that raises the performance of the whole organization and reconciles the individual's need for achievement with society's need for institutional performance.

The model it argues

A framework in which learnable practices (design levers) applied by the executive foster psychological orientations and behavioral patterns that produce executive and organizational effectiveness, moderated by contextual realities of organizational life.

Key ideas

Time Management Practice: The disciplined executive practice of understanding and controlling the use of time by recording where it goes, pruning nonproductive demands, and consolidating discretionary time into large blocks.
Focus on Contribution: An outward, results-oriented mental stance in which the executive asks what he can contribute to the performance of the whole organization rather than focusing on effort or authority.
Making Strength Productive: The practice of organizing work and staffing to maximize the relevant strengths of people while making their weaknesses irrelevant, rather than seeking to avoid weakness.
Concentration on Priorities: The practice of doing first things first and one thing at a time, deliberately setting priorities and posteriorities and abandoning unproductive tasks of the past.
Effective Decision-Making Practice: A systematic decision process operating at the highest conceptual level, classifying the problem, defining boundary conditions, seeking disagreement and alternatives, building in action, and installing feedback.
Courage: The disposition to choose the future over the past, opportunity over problem, one's own direction over the bandwagon, and high aims over safe ones, thereby converting knowledge into productive action.
Organizational Realities: The four inescapable conditions of organizational life that exert pressure toward nonresults: captive time, pressure to operate, dependence on others, and inside-focus.
Executive Effectiveness: The learned capacity to get the right things done, converting resources of intelligence, knowledge, and ability into results and achievement.