Notes on "The Effective Executive"
“The Effective Executive” is a guide-style textbook written by management guru Peter Drucker for knowledge executives on how to be effective. This book was completed in the 1950s. Looking at it now, the views in the book on knowledge executives, manual workers, and computer-aided office work are a bit outdated, but the core views in the book are still inspiring for today’s knowledge executives.
Executives must be effective, and effectiveness can be learned is the premise of this book’s argument. For organization heads, the guiding significance of this argument lies in that the heads themselves must first be effective, and at the same time, they must guide all organization members to become effective executives.
Time is the important and only factor affecting whether an organization can be outstanding. By counting time distribution, finding out where time is spent, and through process reengineering, organizational division of labor can effectively utilize time. We can easily count personal time distribution through apps like Time Blocks and Rescuetime, and we can also statistically analyze organizational time efficiency through organizational collaboration software like Teambition. Organizational process reengineering and division of labor authorization require optimization through practice based on the actual situation of the organization. This point can learn from the methods of outstanding companies in “Good to Great”.
Performance is external, and value is reflected in the gains of the objects served. Anyone within the organization, not limited to management, sales and marketing, but also including R&D and production, their performance measurement standards are external. That is, only contribution is performance. This requires everyone to:
- Focus on self-development, and ask yourself often: What can I contribute to the organization, and what strengths do I need to apply to my work. 2. Through communication, get external evaluation of your contribution to determine whether you have really made a contribution. Contribution is not something you say you have, it must be an external evaluation. Working behind closed doors day after day may be very hard, but if the wheel you make has no meaning to the outside world, it is invalid behavior. 3. Teamwork is an important measure to generate performance. Horizontal cooperation between different departments within the organization is the only way to enable the organization to burst out with real vitality, and everyone’s value can be reflected. 4. Xiaomi’s Lei Jun said that founders should spend 80% of their time looking for people. Real managers must put the interests of the organization first and personal interests second, find the people the organization needs most with a Bole (talent scout) mentality, and train them into outstanding managers, and only then will the organization develop sustainably.
Use people’s strengths. Everyone has both strengths and weaknesses. Use people’s strengths, and don’t use their weaknesses. For corporate managers, the first thing is to discover talents. In the process of discovering talents, special attention should be paid to qualities that are difficult to cultivate later, such as perseverance and humility, while skills that can be trained such as programming and marketing are not important. Managers should set up posts for people, rather than setting a post and then looking for people who meet the basic requirements of this post.
Regarding putting first things first, Peter Drucker’s greatest contribution lies in clarifying the boundaries of “first things”: focus on the future rather than the past; focus on opportunities, not difficulties; choose your own direction, rather than blindly following; goals should be high and novel, not just for safety and convenience. This is the same principle as Dr. Stephen Covey mentioned in “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” regarding putting first things first: focusing on preventive measures; building relationships; identifying new development opportunities; and formulating plans and recreation, which are four “important but not urgent” things. Specifically in business operation, it means not accommodating existing product lines to develop new products, but with the aim of developing new technologies or developing new businesses. For example, in the face of mobile Internet social networking, Tencent did not pin its hopes on the mature mobile QQ product, but re-developed WeChat.
Finally, Peter Drucker said that determining whether the nature of a problem is recurrent or incidental, finding the boundaries for solving the problem, finding solutions through assumptions and listening to opposing opinions, and then executing without compromise are methods for effective decision-making.
Published at: Aug 25, 2019 · Modified at: Dec 4, 2025
