The Effective Executive

The problem it starts from

By the 1960s Peter Drucker had spent two decades watching large organisations from inside: General Motors, which he studied for Concept of the Corporation in 1946, and many companies and public bodies after it. He had already coined the term “knowledge worker” in 1959 for people whose work consists of thinking, judging and deciding rather than making things with their hands. What struck him was how unevenly such people performed. Brilliant people often achieved little. Others of ordinary gifts got a great deal done. Intelligence, imagination and knowledge did not seem to predict who was effective.

His answer, set out in The Effective Executive in 1967, is that effectiveness is a set of practices, and that the practices can be learned. He also widened the word “executive”. He did not mean only the people at the top. He meant anyone, a researcher or an analyst as much as a vice-president, whose position or knowledge means their decisions affect what the whole organisation can achieve. In a knowledge economy that is a great many people.

The practices

Know where your time goes. Drucker begins not with planning but with recording. People who keep an honest log of how they spend their hours are nearly always surprised: the time has gone to meetings, interruptions and requests that never registered as choices. The second step is to cut ruthlessly what produces nothing, including work that could be done by someone else and work that wastes other people’s time. The third is to consolidate what is left. His observation is that knowledge work needs time in large blocks. Ninety uninterrupted minutes produce more than six fragments of fifteen.

Ask what you can contribute. Most people describe their job by its effort or its rank. Drucker asks them to describe it by its results for the organisation, which usually means looking outward, at customers or users or the people who depend on the work. The question changes what people do. A specialist who asks it starts making their knowledge usable by others, rather than waiting for others to come and ask.

Make strengths productive. Organisations tend to staff around weaknesses: they look for the candidate with fewest faults and design jobs so nobody can fail. Drucker argues the opposite. Find what a person does exceptionally well and build the job so that strength counts, then make the weaknesses irrelevant. The same applies upward. An effective executive learns how their own boss reads and decides, and presents work in the form the boss can use, without flattery or manipulation.

Put first things first, one at a time. Concentration is the secret, in Drucker’s account, because there are always more important things to do than time to do them. He adds a practice that few organisations follow: regularly deciding what to stop. Every activity, product and programme should be asked whether, if the organisation were not already doing it, it would start now. When the answer is no, the question is how quickly it can be dropped. He calls the choice of what not to do “posteriorities”, and he thought choosing them took more courage than choosing priorities.

Make effective decisions. The book’s longest chapter treats decisions as a process with distinct steps. First, decide whether the problem is generic, and therefore deserves a rule or policy, or genuinely exceptional. Then define what the decision must achieve, the boundary conditions. Then work out what is right before asking what is acceptable, because compromise comes soon enough. Then build the action into the decision, naming who must know and who must act. Finally, test it against results. Drucker also insists that decisions begin with opinions rather than facts, since people who claim to start from facts have usually picked the facts that fit. And he wanted disagreement. A decision reached without dissent, he warns, is one whose alternatives have not been examined.

The idea underneath

The book is short, and its practices can look like common sense. What holds them together is an argument about what knowledge work is. A manual worker’s output can be seen and counted. A knowledge worker’s output is a contribution to someone else’s work, so it exists only when it is used. That is why so many of Drucker’s practices point outward: to the customer, to the boss, to colleagues who will act on a decision. Effectiveness, in this view, is the discipline of making one’s own knowledge useful to the organisation.

There is also a moral idea in it, which Drucker never states as a thesis but which runs through his whole body of work. He saw organisations as the main way modern societies get things done, and believed they could only be legitimate if they worked. A knowledge worker who is busy but ineffective wastes their own talent and also weakens the institutions that people depend on. The practices are modest, but the stakes he attached to them were not.

Since it was published

Drucker restated the core of the book in a Harvard Business Review article in 2004, “What Makes an Effective Executive”, the year before he died. Its additions are telling: write an action plan, take responsibility for communicating, think and say “we” rather than “I”. The practices have since spread into many systems, from time-blocking methods to the “stop doing” lists that management writers recommend. Decision research by Daniel Kahneman, Gary Klein and others has filled in much of what Drucker sensed about how decisions go wrong, including the value he placed on structured dissent, which the site’s idea page Groupthink and the Silence of Rooms explores from the other side.

A first step

Keep a record of your time for two weeks, as it happens, not from memory at the end of the day. Then go through it with one question for each item: what would happen if this were not done at all? Where the honest answer is “nothing”, stop doing it. Use part of what is freed to create one block of at least ninety minutes each week for the work only you can do.