Managing Oneself and What Makes an Effective Executive

Managing Oneself and What Makes an Effective Executive
by Peter F. Drucker (1909-2005)

Peter Drucker is often referred to as the leading management thinker of the 20th century. His seminal works include Concept of the Corporation (1946) and The Practice of Management (1954). This short volume includes two of Drucker’s articles: “Managing Oneself” and “What Makes an Effective Executive.” Here are some highlights.

MANAGING ONESELF

“We will have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution.”

“A person can perform only from strength… First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results… Second, work on improving your strengths.”

“Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it. Far too many people—especially people with great expertise in one area—are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.”   This reminds me of the phrase Epistemic Trespassing, coined by Nathan Ballantyne.

“One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all… We all have a vast number of areas in which we have no talent or skill and little chance of becoming even mediocre. In those areas a person—and especially a knowledge worker—should not take on work, jobs, and assignments.” This work should be delegated to others.

“One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence… Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.”

“How Do I Learn?… Indeed, there are probably half a dozen different ways to learn… There are people, like Churchill, who learn by writing. Some people learn by taking copious notes… Some people learn by doing things. Others learn by hearing themselves talk.”

“Beethoven, for example, left behind an enormous number of sketchbooks, yet he said he never actually looked at them when he composed. Asked why he kept them, he is reported to have replied, ‘If I don’t write it down immediately, I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook, I never forget it and I never have to look it up again.’”

WHAT MAKES AN EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE

“Harry Truman did not have one ounce of charisma, for example, yet he was among the most effective chief executives in U.S. history. Similarly, some of the best business and nonprofit CEOs I’ve worked with over a 65-year consulting career were not stereotypical leaders. They were all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses. They ranged from extroverted to nearly reclusive, from easygoing to controlling, from generous to parsimonious.”

“What made them all effective is that they followed the same eight practices:

• They asked, ‘What needs to be done?’
• They asked, ‘What is right for the enterprise?’
• They developed action plans.
• They took responsibility for decisions.
• They took responsibility for communicating.
• They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
• They ran productive meetings.
• They thought and said ‘we’ rather than ‘I.’”

Drucker adds one more bonus practice: “Listen first, speak last.”

“The answer to the question ‘What needs to be done?’ almost always contains more than one urgent task. But effective executives do not splinter themselves. They concentrate on one task if at all possible. If they are among those people—a sizable minority—who work best with a change of pace in their workday, they pick two tasks. I have never encountered an executive who remains effective while tackling more than two tasks at a time.”

“However, after completing the original top-priority task, the executive resets priorities rather than moving on to number two from the original list. He asks, ‘What must be done now?’ This generally results in new and different priorities.”

“Effective executives’ second practice—fully as important as the first—is to ask, ‘Is this the right thing for the enterprise?’ They do not ask if it’s right for the owners, the stock price, the employees, or the executives… They know that the share price is important not only for the shareholders but also for the enterprise, since the price/earnings ratio sets the cost of capital. But they also know that a decision that isn’t right for the enterprise will ultimately not be right for any of the stakeholders.”

“Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course… But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploiting opportunities produces results.”

“Effective executives treat change as an opportunity rather than a threat. They systematically look at changes, inside and outside the corporation, and ask, ‘How can we exploit this change as an opportunity for our enterprise?’”

“We all know, thanks to Chester Barnard’s 1938 classic The Function of the Executive, that organizations are held together by information rather than by ownership or command.”

“The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known. Sloan, who headed General Motors from the 1920s to the 1950s, spent most of his six working days a week in meetings—three days a week for formal committee meetings with a set membership, the other three days in ad hoc meetings with individual GM executives or with a small group of executives.”

“At the beginning of a formal meeting, Sloan announced the meeting’s purpose. He then listened. He never took notes and he rarely spoke except to clarify a confusing point. At the end he summed up, thanked the participants, and left.  Then he immediately wrote a short memo addressed to one attendee of the meeting. In that note he summarized the discussion and its conclusions and spelled out any work assignment decided upon in the meeting (including a decision to hold another meeting on the subject or to study an issue). He specified the deadline and the executive who was to be accountable for the assignment. He sent a copy of the memo to everyone who’d been present at the meeting. It was through these memos—each a small masterpiece—that Sloan made himself into an outstandingly effective executive.”

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Drucker, Peter F. Managing Oneself and What Makes an Effective Executive. Harvard Business Review Press, 2017. Buy from Amazon.com

Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Books about Peter Drucker:

• Peter Drucker and Management by Karen E. Linkletter (2024)
• A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness by Joseph A. Maciariello (2014)
• Inside Drucker’s Brain by Jeffrey A. Krames (2008)
• The World According to Peter Drucker by Jack Beatty (1998)

Books by Peter Drucker, published posthumously:

• Peter F. Drucker on the Network Economy (2020)
• Peter F. Drucker on Practical Leadership (2020)
• Peter F. Drucker on Nonprofits and the Public Sector (2020)
• Peter F. Drucker on Management Essentials (2020)
• The Peter F. Drucker Reader: Selected Articles from the Father of Modern Management Thinking (2016)
• Peter Drucker’s Five Most Important Questions: Enduring Wisdom for Today’s Leaders (2015)
• A Functioning Society: Community, Society, and Polity in the Twentieth Century (2011)
• The Five Most Important Questions Self-Assessment Tool: Participant Workbook (2010)
• The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (2008)
• Management, Revised Edition (first published in 1973. Revised by Joseph A. Maciariello, 2008)
• Management Cases, Revised Edition (2008)
• The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your (Nonprofit) Organization (2008)
• People and Performance: The Best of Peter Drucker on Management (2007)
• Innovation and Entrepreneurship (2006)
• The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (2006)
• Managing for Results (2006)
• Managing the Non-profit Organization: Principles and Practices (2006)
• Classic Drucker: Wisdom from Peter Drucker from the Pages of Harvard Business Review (2006)

Books by Peter Drucker, published during his lifetime:

• The Daily Drucker: 366 Days of Insight and Motivation for Getting the Right Things Done (2004)
• Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999)
• Peter Drucker on the Profession of Management (1998)
• Adventures of a Bystander (1998)
• The Executive in Action: Managing for Results, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the Effective Executive (1996)
• Managing in a Time of Great Change (1995)
• Post Capitalist Society (1994)
• Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1993)
• The Age of Discontinuity (1992)
• Managing in Turbulent Times (1980)
• The Practice of Management  (first published in 1954)
• Concept of the Corporation (first published in 1946)
• The End of Economic Man: The Origins of Totalitarianism (first published in 1939)