The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)
Peter F. Drucker
Language: English
Pages: 208
ISBN: 0060833459
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
What makes an effective executive?
The measure of the executive, Peter F. Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done." This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.
Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned:
- Managing time
- Choosing what to contribute to the organization
- Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect
- Setting the right priorities
- Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making
Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter F. Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
The Think Big Manifesto: Think You Can't Change Your Life (and the World)? Think Again
The High-Speed Company: Creating Urgency and Growth in a Nanosecond Culture
Reasonably Simple Economics: Why the World Works the Way It Does
Quick and Nimble: Lessons from Leading CEOs on How to Create a Culture of Innovation
Needs to know and to understand to be able to make productive the fragment the specialist produces. • It is popular today to believe that our society is divided into “scientists” and “laymen.” It is then easy to demand that the laymen learn a little bit of the scientists’ knowledge, his terminology, his tools, and so on. But if society was ever divided that way, it was a hundred years ago. Today almost everybody in modern organization is an expert with a high degree of specialized knowledge,.
MAKING STRENGTH PRODUCTIVE 97 great trouble managing my subordinates. But how do I manage my boss?” It is actually remarkably easy—but only effective executives know that. The secret is that effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive. • This should be elementary prudence. Contrary to popular legend, subordinates do not, as a rule, rise to position and prominence over the prostrate bodies of incompetent bosses. If their boss is not promoted, they will tend to be bottled up.
Doing old things or the necessity for doing something new, and have otherwise made the executive’s “completed” project their own daily routine. If this is slighted because there is no time, then all the work and effort have been for nothing. Yet this is the invariable result of the executive’s failure to concentrate and to impose priorities. Another predictable result of leaving control of priorities to the pressures is that the work of top management does not get done at all. That is always.
And the thalidomide tragedy were only the first occurrences of what, under conditions of modern power technology or of modern pharmacology, are likely to become fairly frequent malfunctions unless generic solutions are found. All events but the truly unique require a generic solution. They require a rule, a policy, a principle. Once the right principle has been developed all manifestations of the same generic situation can be handled pragmatically; that is, by adaptation of the rule to the.
Or to carry out predetermined reactions to expected events (whether the appearance of hostile nuclear missiles on the far horizon or the appearance of a crude oil with an unusual sulfur content in the petroleum refinery) the decision has to be anticipated and thought through. It can no longer be improvised. It can no longer be groped for in a series of small adaptations, each specific, each approximate, each, to use the physicist’s terminology, a “virtual” rather than a real decision. It has to.