The Effective Executive

Classic book on management.

https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/Ten-Lessons-I-Learned-from-Peter-Drucker.html#articletop

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Notes

• Good human relations are those relations based on contribution and are productive.
• The generalist is a specialist who can relate their small area of knowledge to the greater universe.

• What contribution do you require of me to make your contribution?
• Effective executives must be concerned with the usability of their knowledge by others
• The man of knowledge has always been expected to make himself understood.
• People adjust to the level of demands made on them.
• A certainty in human affairs is change
• The future generation should take for granted what the former has accomplished. P57
• An org that has not perpetuated itself has failed.
• If there is confusion on what results should be, there is no results. P55
• Know thyself. Know thy time. P.52
• Work force is too large if more than a small Amount of time is spent managing friction
• P38 What do I do to you that wastes your time without adding to your effectiveness? To ask this without being afraid of the truth is a mark of an effective executive
• Five things. EE know where their time goes. They gear their efforts for results, not work. They build on strengths. They focus and prioritize. Make effective decisions - based on strategy.
• Effectiveness requires competence, not special talent.
• Effectiveness means getting the right things done p22
• There is no effective personality. Effectiveness is learned.
• Point: skill and knowledge are rare, thus increasing effectiveness from people of mediocre skill or knowledge is the game of being an effective executive, in the broad sense.
• Operations research people were supposed to be polymaths, but then their deep skill would be wasted on operations? P19
• But we do have ample supply of the incompetent
• We could use people of broader knowledge. We certainly could use people of much greater abilities in many places. But not much can be done with further effort in these 2 areas. P18. Bullshit.
• Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual - p11
• Manual work - doing things right rather getting the right things done.
• The greatest wisdom not applied to action is meaningless data -p5
• You can manage no one yet be an executive p8
• Execs - make decisions of impact upon results
• Because of 4 affordances of the corporation, the exec should assume that he will be ineffective, unless special means are taken to become effective.

Comments

1. The book 'The Effective Executive' by Peter Drucker is fascinating, first off - 'many brilliant (high ability) people are markedly ineffectual'
2. Effectiveness can be learned.
3. There are unfortunately few brilliant people, but luckily average people who learn to be effective pick up the slack.
4. My conclusion: 'briliance. should be redefined as 'Effectiveness Intelligence'. This is a positive outlook on the future, as it can be learned. And it demotes the armchair theorists from the status of prime movers (today) to insignificance.
5. One other great point: orgs are doomed because communication between specialists is difficult. There is no such thing as a 'generalist' according to Drucker, only 'specialists in multiple areas'. This is a central question OSE struggles with.

There is a solution - Drucker says that the concept of 'contribution' to the org or to the world is what breaks specialists out of the communication trap (they suck at communicating). Because 'contribution' makes the specialists concerned with the usability of their knowledge by others. For OSE, this means 'culture' is prime: culture of contribution, culture of 'solving pressing world issues' - which is as big a contribution as one can imagine.

There is transcendence: with enough discipline, we can learn more than effectiveness: genius. One of OSE's core question is 'mass creation of genius', and our company can be a place where people can do that full time from the time they graduate high school.