The Effective Executive – Book Notes

Part of our Book Summary series where we share notes from our favorite books.

Read more details and reviews for The Effective Executive on Amazon.

This is one of our favorite books on productivity. It’s not about working more efficiently; it’s about finding the right things to work on in the first place.

You can apply this as a student taking exams, but it becomes even more important when you get to the workplace.

 

The Effective Executive — Highlights

Management books usually deal with managing other people. The subject of this book is managing oneself

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

Effectiveness is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned.

There is no reason why anyone with normal endowment should not acquire competence in any practice. Mastery might well elude him; for this one might need special talents. But what is needed in effectiveness is competence.

These are essentially five such practices—five such habits of the mind that have to be acquired to be an effective executive:

1. Effective executives know where their time goes. They work systematically at managing the little of their time that can be brought under their control.

2. Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?” rather than with the work to be done, let alone with its techniques and tools.

3. Effective executives build on strengths—their own strengths, the strengths of their superiors, colleagues, and subordinates; and on the strengths in the situation, that is, on what they can do.

4. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.

5. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions.

 

Step 1: Know Thy Time

This three-step process: recording time, managing time, and consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all

To find these time-wastes, one asks of all activities in the time records: “What would happen if this were not done at all?” And if the answer is, “Nothing would happen,” then obviously the conclusion is to stop doing it.

The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?”

A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes.

Time-wastes often result from overstaffing.

Another common time-waster is malorganization. Its symptom is an excess of meetings.

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.

 

Step 2: Focus on Outward Contribution

The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward toward goals.

He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.

For every organization needs performance in three major areas:

• It needs direct results;
• building of values and their reaffirmation;
• and building and developing people for tomorrow.

People adjust to the level of the demands made on them.

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.

People in general, and knowledge workers in particular, grow according to the demands they make on themselves. They grow according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment.

 

Step 3: Build on Strengths

To achieve results, one has to use all the available strengths—the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths.

In staffing they look for excellence in one major area, and not for performance that gets by all around.

the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.

The ones who are enthusiastic and who, in turn, have results to show for their work, are the ones whose abilities are being challenged and used. Those that are deeply frustrated all say, in one way or another: “My abilities are not being put to use.”

While the others complain about their inability to do anything, the effective executives go ahead and do. As a result, the limitations that weigh so heavily on their brethren often melt away.

He looks at his own performance and at his own results and tries to discern a pattern.

“What are the things,” he asks, “that I seem to be able to do with relative ease, while they come rather hard to other people?”

In human affairs, the distance between the leaders and the average is a constant. If leadership performance is high, the average will go up.

 

Step 4: Concentrate on High-Leverage Activities

If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.

This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.

He always asks: “Is this still worth doing?” And if it isn’t, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization.

The job is, however, not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it.

The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting “posteriorities”—that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle—and of sticking to the decision.

Most executives have learned that what one postpones, one actually abandons.

Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities:

• Pick the future as against the past;
• Focus on opportunity rather than on problem;
• Choose your own direction—rather than climb on the bandwagon; and
• Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.

 

Step 5: Make Effective Decisions

The first rule in decision-making is that one does not make a decision unless there is disagreement.

It is, first, the only safeguard against the decision-maker’s becoming the prisoner of the organization

Second, disagreement alone can provide alternatives to a decision

Above all, disagreement is needed to stimulate the imagination

There is one final question the effective decision-maker asks: “Is a decision really necessary?”

The effective decision-maker compares the risk of action to risk of inaction.

Act if on balance the benefits greatly outweigh cost and risk; and

Act or do not act; but do not “hedge” or compromise.

Executives are not paid for doing things they like to do. They are paid for getting the right things done – most of all in their specific task, the making of effective decisions.