Book SummaryThe Effective Executive, by Peter F. Drucker

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Effective Executive

While many business books tell you how to manage other people, The Effective Executive, a 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker, explains how to manage yourself to be effective.

Drucker defines effectiveness as choosing and doing the right things—that is, the things that significantly improve personal and organizational performance and results. He argues that effectiveness derives from a set of five practices anyone can learn rather than from unique talents or charisma. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up today and how others have built on them.

A leader in management theory and practice for over 60 years, Drucker, who died in 2005, authored 39 books and countless articles, including more than 30 essays in the Harvard Business Review. He’s credited with being the founder of modern management.

(Shortform note: Drucker’s obituary in the New York Times noted that his ideas on management were so influential that a comment from him could change the way top corporate leaders operated. His thinking has continued to inspire business leaders and authors—for example, the late Jack Welch, Tom Peters, Jim Collins (Good to Great), Ken Blanchard, Andrew Grove (High Output Management), Jeff Bezos, Stephen Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), and Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek).)

Practice #1: Manage Your Time

Drucker’s first practice for effectiveness is managing your time. He argues that you first need to understand what you’re currently doing with your time then take control of it. There are three steps: Analyze your time, cut time wasters, and time block. (Shortform note: Drucker's approach differs from the advice in many time management books such as Getting Things Done and The One Thing. These books recommend immediately determining and focusing on what’s most important (prioritizing), rather than first analyzing how you currently spend your time.)

1. Analyze Your Time

Drucker’s guidelines for tracking and analyzing your time are:

• Keep a log as you do things, recording everything you do and how long it takes. Do this for three or four weeks at a time, twice a year. The specific method or format you use doesn’t matter. (Shortform note: Time tracking apps such as RescueTime may be useful, particularly for automatically tracking what you're doing on-screen—an increasingly large proportion of time use that provides myriad opportunities for distraction. Like this knowledge worker who tracked his time, you may be surprised at how little focused work you’re accomplishing.)
• After each recorded period, rethink and revise your schedule (see Step 2). Many people slide back into a pattern of wasting time in about six months, Drucker says, so it takes constant vigilance and adjustment to prevent this drifting. (Shortform note: The Happiness Project recommends taking daily notes about what worked—what you accomplished, when, and how—in order to identify and replicate your most productive habits and times, so you can make them routine.)

2. Cut Time Wasters

Once you’ve recorded your time for a few weeks, Drucker advises rooting out your time-wasting activities with these steps:

1) Identify and eliminate activities that don’t produce results, including things that don’t need to be done in the first place. For each item on your time record, ask yourself what would happen if you hadn’t done it or don’t do it going forward. If the answer is nothing, stop doing it. Drucker claims that most executives could eliminate about 25% of their activities without anyone noticing; he cites speeches, social events, committee memberships, directorships, and lunch or dinner events as often unnecessary.

(Shortform note: Today, such activities might be considered essential parts of branding, marketing, or networking. A way to evaluate these activities and decide if they’re useful enough to continue is to borrow the lean manufacturing idea of determining which ones are value-added versus non-value-added: Value-added activities add customer value to a business process, product, or service. This aligns with Drucker’s advice to say “no” to doing anything that doesn’t help your organization or enhance your contribution to the organization’s performance.)

2) Determine which activities could be done by someone else, and delegate them. While some people view delegating as being lazy or taking advantage of a subordinate, Drucker emphasizes that as an executive, you’re being paid for your unique contribution to the organization’s performance—and when you allow yourself to be distracted from this by tasks someone else can do, you undercut your effectiveness as well as the organization's.

How to Delegate Effectively

In High Output Management, CEO Andrew Grove identifies the following requirements for effective delegating:

• You and the person you’re delegating to need to have the same information and agree on how to do the task.

• You can keep the tasks you like doing as long as you’re fully aware of your motivations for not delegating them.

• You monitor the...

The Effective Executive Summary Shortform Introduction

While business books often tell you how to manage other people, The Effective Executive, a 1966 classic by management expert Peter F. Drucker, explains how to manage yourself to be effective. He defines effectiveness as choosing and doing the right things—that is, the things that significantly improve personal and organizational performance. He argues that effectiveness derives from a set of five practices that anyone can learn rather than from innate talents or charisma. This guide examines how Drucker’s ideas on effectiveness hold up more than 50 years later and how others have built on them.

About the Author

Drucker, who died in 2005, is referred to as the founder of modern management. A leader in management theory and practice for over 60 years, he authored 39 books and countless articles, including more than 30 essays in the Harvard Business Review.

Drucker was born in Austria, received a doctoral degree in Frankfurt, and worked as a reporter in Germany before fleeing to England upon Hitler’s rise to power. He moved to the U.S. in 1937, later becoming a citizen, and taught at New York...

The Effective Executive Summary Introduction

The Effective Executive focuses on how to manage yourself so you get results and help others in your organization get results.

When it comes to results, Drucker differentiates between efficiency and effectiveness: Efficiency is getting a lot of things done, while effectiveness is choosing and getting the right things done. (Shortform note: Elsewhere, Drucker regularly made the often-quoted comment that there’s “nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”) He defined the right things as those that significantly improve personal and organizational performance.

Further, he writes that effectiveness, unlike innate attributes such as talent and intelligence, entails a set of practices you can learn. In fact, it’s essential to learn effectiveness because without it, talent and intelligence won’t get you anywhere. You need effectiveness to magnify and translate them into results.

Individual effectiveness is necessary for organizational effectiveness as well. Drucker argues that rather than hiring for talent, charisma, or a broad set of skills, organizations would...

The Effective Executive Summary Practice #1: Manage Your Time

(Shortform note: Because time management is such a broad topic, we’ve limited the discussion here to Drucker’s ideas and how others have extended or countered them. For wider-ranging examinations of time management, see the list of our guides to top books on time management at the end of this guide.)

Drucker’s first practice for effectiveness is managing your time. He argues that you first need to understand what you’re currently doing with your time then take control of it. There are three steps: Analyze your time, cut time wasters, and time block. (Shortform note: Drucker's approach differs from the advice in many time management books such as Getting Things Done and The One Thing. These books recommend immediately determining and focusing on what’s most important (prioritizing), rather than first analyzing how you currently spend your time.)

Executives have little unscheduled or discretionary time to begin with, Drucker writes, and they’re under constant pressure to use it reactively, dealing with whatever comes up. (Shortform note: Although there was little...

Shortform Exercise: What Are Your Time-Wasters?

Typically, 75% of your time as an executive is spent on things that don’t produce results but are unavoidable. That leaves only 25% to spend on the things that contribute most to organizational performance.

What are three to five time-wasters that affect your day-to-day work?

The Effective Executive Summary Practice #2: Focus

The next practice for effectiveness is focus, which Drucker defines as focusing on only a few key things and doing them one at a time.

Drucker argues that 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 later in this section.)

(Shortform note: In The 4-Hour Workweek, Tim Ferriss echoes Drucker’s ideas of focusing: Instead of being so busy that you have to manage your time, he argues for reducing the number of...

Shortform Exercise: Improve Your Focus

Drucker’s second practice for effectiveness is: Determine your priorities and concentrate on them one at a time.

What are two or three or your key priorities at work?

The Effective Executive Summary 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 says most executives focus downward on handling short-term issues and tasks. In addition, many focus inwardly on what they can get from the organization rather than on what they can contribute.

However, Drucker argues that focusing outwardly on contribution is the key to quality and results, your working relationships, and the way you handle reports and meetings. When you think about your contribution, you see the bigger picture of how your skills and actions relate to the organization and its purpose. You also think in terms of the customer, client, or others with whom the organization interacts.

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...

Shortform Exercise: What’s Your Contribution?

Your job as an executive is to determine your contribution to the organization’s performance and results and to maximize it.

What’s your answer to the question, “What unique contribution can I make to significantly increase organizational performance and results?”

The Effective Executive Summary Practice #4: Maximize Strengths—Yours and Others’

The fourth practice for effectiveness is maximizing 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. (Shortform note: Drucker wrote in 2005 that it takes more effort to improve from incompetent to mediocre than from good to excellent.)

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 strength-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 big companies, it launched the trend of...

Shortform Exercise: Maximize Strength

To increase your effectiveness and that of your organization, identify and build the strengths of those around you, as well as your own.

What’s your main strength? Analyze your performance over the past month. What came more easily to you than to others?

The Effective Executive Summary Practice #5: Make Sound Decisions

Drucker’s fifth and final practice for effectiveness is making sound decisions, for which he offers a five-step process. Effectiveness in this area is crucial because executives’ decisions significantly affect the entire organization and its performance.

(Shortform note: Because decision-making is such a broad topic, we’ve limited the discussion here to Drucker’s ideas and how others have extended or countered them. For wider-ranging examinations of decision-making, see the list of our guides to top books on the subject at the end of this guide.)

Drucker advocates this overall approach to decision-making:

• Don’t make a lot of decisions—make only a few important ones—because the majority of decisions are routine and can be standardized (we’ll discuss this further under Step 1).
• For the important decisions, think conceptually and strategically rather than focusing on individual problem-solving. (Shortform note: Conceptual thinking (connecting disparate ideas or abstractions) is sometimes referred to as out-of-the-box or lateral thinking.)
• Don’t try to make fast decisions, but thoroughly explore what...

The Effective Executive Summary Shortform Resources

Time Management

Following is a list of Shortform guides to time management books:

Getting Things Done

First Things First

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

High Output Management

Indistractable

Deep Work

The 12 Week Year

[Eat That...