PDF Summary:The Effective Executive, by Peter F. Drucker

While many business books tell you how to manage other people, this 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker explains how to manage yourself to be effective. Effectiveness is key to individual and organizational success. Without it, other attributes, such as talent, intelligence, knowledge, and hard work, are useless.

Drucker says anyone can learn five practices for effectiveness: managing your time, focusing on just a few key tasks, making a unique contribution, maximizing your strengths, and making sound decisions. He explains how to implement these practices, which have remained relevant for over 50 years, even as technology and organizations have evolved. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.

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The key to an effective, focused meeting is arguably having a well-planned and designed agenda. In the Harvard Business Review, Roger Schwarz discusses the steps for designing an effective agenda, including:

• Solicit topics from your team and decide which to include in the meeting.

• Determine the goal of discussing each topic you include.

• Structure the discussion of each topic (time limit, discussion leader, how a decision (if any) will be made).

• Share the agenda with participants so they can prepare.

• Conduct the meeting by sticking to the agenda.

• Debrief at the end of the meeting on what could have gone better.

Read our summary of the HBR article to see our customized agenda template for an effective meeting.

3. Time Block

The third step for managing your time (after analyzing it and cutting time-wasters), according to Drucker, is to make the most of the little nonscheduled time you have left (your discretionary time for important tasks that contribute significantly to your company’s performance). He says this typically amounts to only 25% of your total time.

The way to make the most of this time is to consolidate it into blocks as large as possible. Drucker contends that small increments of time are useless—you can’t write a report by spending 15 minutes on it a day. If you try, you won’t get anywhere and will have to start over the next time. But if you can get four or five hours of uninterrupted time, you can create a solid draft that you can flesh out later in smaller time increments. (Shortform note: While time blocking (also called time boxing) is widely recommended and practiced today, it was new when Drucker first wrote about it.)

A Time Blocking Method

In Deep Work, Cal Newport describes one potential time-blocking method:

• Plan your day in half-hour blocks.

• Make a list of tasks you need to finish in the day. Schedule time for each task to the nearest half-hour.

• Schedule time in advance for when you'll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.

• Schedule overrun blocks for tasks you suspect might run overtime.

• If you have lots of shallow tasks (more than 30-50% time), consider how you can replace these with deeper work.

• At the end of the day, review the accuracy of your time blocks.

Practice #2: Focus

The second practice for effectiveness is focus, which Drucker defines as focusing on only a few key things and doing them one at a time. (Shortform note: Drucker actually lists focus as his fourth practice. We’ve moved it to #2 because it encompasses prioritizing, which is closely related to Practice #1, managing your time.)

Drucker says the ability to focus is central to executive performance because:

• When you focus on one thing at a time, you actually get more done because you get each thing done faster. You also do better work, which strengthens your contribution to organizational performance. (Shortform note: In Quiet, Susan Cain notes that focusing may be easier for introverts than for extroverts, because introverts’ preferred work style is to work methodically on one task at a time and concentrate deeply.)
• You can’t do more than one thing at a time well. (Shortform note: Drucker was ahead of the research in realizing that multitasking yields poor results. We’ll discuss the myth of multitasking below.)

How to Focus

While Drucker emphasizes the need for and value of focusing, he doesn’t discuss how to focus beyond simply scheduling “alone” time. However, later authors discuss how to focus or do deep (focused) work.

For example, in Deep Work, Cal Newport argues that you must strengthen your ability to focus by working it like a muscle. He says that after practicing four steps daily for a few months, you’ll increase your ability to do deep work, and raise your level of concentration:

• Schedule when you’ll use the Internet. Avoid it completely outside these times.

• Set tight deadlines for yourself that require you to concentrate at the limit of your ability to make the deadlines.

• Practice productive meditation—think about a problem while you do a low-intensity physical activity, like walking or showering.

• Practice memorization techniques.

Multitasking

The opposite of focus is multitasking, which Drucker recognized as unproductive. Gary Keller writes in The One Thing that people can do two things at once—for instance, walk and talk. But like computers, we alternate our focus. A conflict occurs when a new activity requires a brain channel already in use or when one task demands greater attention—for example, when you’re driving and start focusing on a text message instead of on the road.

Downsides of multitasking include:

• You get less done.

• When you bounce between activities, you lose time as your brain reorients.

• You make more mistakes and make bad decisions.

• You stress yourself.

Determine Priorities and Non-Priorities

After eliminating unproductive activities, Drucker’s next step is deciding which productive tasks and opportunities are priorities—the right tasks on which you concentrate one at a time—and which are non-priorities, things you don’t do.

While most people focus on determining priorities, Drucker contends that consciously deciding your non-priorities is equally important, because non-priorities tend to encroach on priorities unless you actively resist or eliminate them. Non-priorities are tasks you’ve decided you won’t do or opportunities you won’t pursue now, if at all. These are activities that offer little or no significant long-term value.

Identifying Non-Priorities

Several authors, especially sales consultant and author Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog), have built on Drucker’s idea of priorities and non-priorities. To determine what activities you can drop, Tracy recommends these steps:

• List the work activities that take the most of your time.

• Ask yourself whether you’d pay someone the equivalent of your salary to do each of them. If not, stop doing them—delegate or eliminate them.

Priorities

Drucker doesn’t give any specific advice on how to set priorities—he says setting priorities requires courage more than analysis. In his view, courage requires that you:

• Favor the future over the past. Successful companies are those that innovate rather than build on existing products.
• Focus on opportunities, not problems. It's more valuable to translate an opportunity into results for the future than to solve a current problem.

How to Prioritize

In Eat That Frog, Brian Tracy proposes the ABCDE method for prioritizing a to-do list. Write down everything you have to do for the next day. Then, rank each item by marking it with an A, B, C, D, or E, as follows:

• A—must do

• B—should do

• C—would be nice to do

• D—delegate

• E—eliminate

Practice #3: Make Your Unique Contribution

Drucker’s third practice for effectiveness is determining and applying your unique contribution. This means looking beyond your immediate work or task and being guided by the larger question, “What unique contribution can I make to significantly increase organizational performance and results?”

Drucker advises you to take responsibility for your own contribution and results, then request the same from your employees by asking, “What contribution do you intend to make, and what’s our best use of your contribution (knowledge and ability)?” Finally, only hold meetings if their purpose advances your contribution to the organization.

Determining Your Contribution

In The Effective Executive, Drucker leaves it up to the reader to determine her unique contribution for results. However, years later in a 2005 Harvard Business Review article, Drucker listed three questions executives and knowledge workers should ask to determine their contribution. Instead of the typical question, “What do I want to do?”, ask:

• What does the situation require?

• Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done?

• What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Practice #4: Maximize Strengths—Yours and Others’

The fourth practice for effectiveness is building or leveraging strengths—your own strengths and the strengths of those around you—to achieve results.

Drucker argues that you can’t accomplish anything significant by focusing on your own or others’ weaknesses. When you focus on weaknesses, you undermine the purpose of the organization, which is to translate people’s strengths into performance for results. He says that morally, managers owe it to the organization to maximize the strength of every employee, and owe it to employees to enable them to excel to the extent possible.

What Is a Strengths-Based Approach?

The Gallup organization popularized strengths-based development for performance management and leadership development in 2001, although the idea arose in the 1980s as an approach to social work. Embraced by HR professionals and major companies, strengths-based development launched the trend of strengths coaching.

Gallup defines strengths as a person’s unique combination of talents, abilities, and motivators. Strengths-based development helps employees understand and leverage their capabilities; it focuses on what they do well rather than what they do poorly.

Gallup says its research over 40 years shows that when employers focus on workers’ strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses, they have better employee engagement, performance, retention, customer engagement, and profitability.

Practice #5: Make Sound Decisions

Drucker’s fifth and final practice for effectiveness is making sound decisions. He lays out a five-step process:

Step 1: Determine whether the situation requiring a decision is typical or unique. If it’s typical, it can be solved by applying a principle or rule.

Step 2: Determine the objectives the decision must meet, and the limitations or constraints (such as budget) affecting the solution.

Step 3: In considering options, focus on the right action rather than the acceptable action (this sets a benchmark before making any compromises or concessions with the decision).

Step 4: As part of the decision, determine how it will be implemented (otherwise, it’s just an intention).

Step 5: Establish a feedback mechanism for testing whether the decision works.

Comparison With Other Decision-Making Processes

Although there are variations, many business textbooks and leadership programs teach these typical steps for making decisions:

• Identify the decision (the problem you must solve or question you must answer).

• Gather the relevant information (from both internal and external sources).

• Identify the options.

• Weigh the pros and cons of each option.

• Choose among the options (make your decision).

• Take action (create a plan and assign tasks).

• Review your decision (ultimately, what worked and what didn’t).

This process differs from Drucker’s first two steps of categorizing the decision and determining parameters, and his fourth step of focusing on right versus acceptable. These steps are bigger-picture elements not included in typical decision-making processes.