Drucker

Management books usually deal with managing other people. The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness. That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself. Indeed, executives who do not manage themselves for effectiveness cannot possibly expect to manage their associates and subordinates. Management is largely by example. Executives who do not know how to make themselves effective in their own job and work set the wrong example.

In forty-five years of work as a consultant with a large number of executives in a wide variety of organizations—large and small; businesses, government agencies, labor unions, hospitals, universities, community services; American, European, Latin American and Japanese—I have not come across a single “natural”: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones have had to learn to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became habit. But all the ones who worked on making themselves effective executives succeeded in doing so. Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned.

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.

The first practice is to ask what needs to be done. Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success. Failure to ask this question will render even the ablest executive ineffectual.

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. Of course they know that shareholders, employees, and executives are important constituencies who have to support a decision, or at least acquiesce in it, if the choice is to be effective…

Asking “What is right for the enterprise?” does not guarantee that the right decision will be made. Even the most brilliant executive is human and thus prone to mistakes and prejudices. But failure to ask the question virtually guarantees the wrong decision.

Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives, until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time.

[The action plan] should be revised often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure. The same is true for changes in the business environment, in the market, and especially in people within the enterprise—all these changes demand that the plan be revised.

Finally, the action plan has to become the basis for the executive’s time management. Time is an executive’s scariest and most precious resource. And organisations—whether government agencies, businesses, or nonprofits—are inherently time wasters. The action plan will prove useless unless it’s allowed to determine how the executive spends his or her time.

Take responsibility for decisions

• A decision has not been made until people know:

• The name of the person accountable for carrying it out;

• the deadline;

• the names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it—or at least not be strongly opposed to it—and

• the names of the people who have to be informed of the decision, even if they are not directly affected by it.

Focus on opportunities

Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploring opportunities produces results.

Specifically, executives scan these seven situations for opportunities:

• an unexpected success or failure in their own enterprise, in a competing enterprise, or in the industry;

• a gap between what is and what could be in market, process, product, or service (for example, in the nineteenth century, the paper industry concentrated on the 10% of each tree that became wood pulp and totally neglected the possibilities in the remaining 90%, which became waste);

• innovation in a process, product or service, whether inside or outside the enterprise or its industry;

• changes in industry structure and market structure;

• demographics;

• changes in mind-set, values, perception, mood, or meaning; and

• new knowledge or a new technology.

Unless there is a true catastrophe, problems are not discussed in management meetings until opportunities have been analyszed and properly dealt with.

Effective executives put their best people on opportunities rather than on problems. One way to staff for opportunities is to ask each member of the management group to prepare two lists every six months—a list of opportunities for the entire enterprise and a list of the best-performing people throughout the enterprise.

Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself. The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known.

“Yet men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs. High intelligence is common enough among executives. Imagination is far from rare. The level of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective plodders

The realities of the executive’s situation both demand effectiveness from him and make effectiveness exceedingly difficult to achieve. Indeed, unless executives work at becoming effective, the realities of their situation will push them into futility.

The executive in organization is in an entirely different position. In his situation there are four major realities over which he has essentially no control. Every one of them is built into organization and into the executive’s day and work. He has no choice but to “cooperate with the inevitable.” But every one of these realities exerts pressure toward nonresults and nonperformance.

1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else. If one attempted to define an “executive” operationally (that is, through his activities) one would have to define him as a captive of the organization. Everybody can move in on his time, and everybody does…

1. Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work… The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does…

But events rarely tell the executive anything, let alone the real problem… If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved…

1. The third reality pushing the executive toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization. This means that he is effective only if and when other people make use of what he contributes…

1. Finally, the executive is within an organization. Every executive, whether his organization is a business or a research laboratory, a government agency, a large university, or the air force, sees the inside—the organization—as close and immediate reality. He sees the outside only through thick and distorting lenses, if at all. What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality.

The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment.

But it is the inside of the organization that is most visible to the executive. It is the inside that has immediacy for him. Its relations and contacts, its problems and challenges, its crosscurrents and gossip reach him and touch him at every point. Unless he makes special efforts to gain direct access to outside reality, he will become increasingly inside-focused. The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside.

Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.

These four realities the executive cannot change. They are necessary conditions of his existence. But he must therefore assume that he will be ineffectual unless he makes special efforts to learn to be effective.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well. They have to be acquired, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until “6 x 6 = 36” has become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.

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.

1. 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.

1. 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. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.

1. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.

1. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.” And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

These are the elements of executive effectiveness—and these are the subjects of this book.

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process:

• recording time,

• managing time, and

• consolidating time

is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

Everything requires time. It is the one truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

This is particularly true with respect to time spent working with people, which is, of course, a central task in the work of the executive. People are time-consumers. And most people are time-wasters.

To spend a few minutes with people is simply not productive. If one wants to get anything across, one has to spend a fairly large minimum quantum of time. The manager who thinks that he can discuss the plans, direction, and performance of one of his subordinates in fifteen minutes—and many managers believe this—is just deceiving himself. If one wants to get to the point of having an impact, one needs probably at least an hour and usually much more. And if one has to establish a human relationship, one needs infinitely more time.

One has to sit down with a knowledge worker and think through with him what should be done and why, before one can even know whether he is doing a satisfactory job or not. And this is time-consuming.

Since the knowledge worker directs himself, he must understand what achievement is expected of him and why. He must also understand the work of the people who have to use his knowledge output. For this, he needs a good deal of information, discussion, instruction—all things that take time. And contrary to common belief, this time demand is made not only on his superior but equally on his colleagues.

People must feel that “we have all the time in the world.” This actually means that one gets a great deal done fast. But it means also that one has to make available a good deal of time in one chunk and without too much interruption.

Mixing personal relations and work relations is time-consuming. If hurried, it turns into friction. Yet any organization rests on this mixture. The more people are together, the more time will their sheer interaction take, the less time will be available to them for work, accomplishment, and results.

Among the effective executives I have had occasion to observe, there have been people who make decisions fast, and people who make them rather slowly. But without exception, they make personnel decisions slowly and they make them several times before they really commit themselves.

Systematic time management is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can. This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. 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. …

1. The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?” … “Delegation” as the term is customarily used, is a misunderstanding—is indeed misdirection. But getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in effectiveness.

1. 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. There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple way to find out. That is to ask other people. Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive…

Now, however, he [the senior financial executive] satisfies the status needs of his subordinates in a different manner. He sends out a printed form which reads: “I have asked [Messrs Smith, Jones, and Robinson] to meet with me [Wednesday at 3] in [the fourth floor conference room] to discuss budget. Please come if you think that you need the information or want to take part in the discussion. But you will in any event receive right away a full summary of the discussion and of any decisions reached, together with a request for your comments.” Where formerly a dozen people came and stayed all afternoon, three men and a secretary to take the notes now get the matter over with within an hour or so. And no one feels left out.’

Many executives know all about these unproductive and unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But this mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.

Managers, however, need to be equally concerned with time-loss that results from poor management and deficient organization. Poor management wastes everybody’s time—but above all, it wastes the manager’s time.

1. The first task here is to identify the time-wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight. The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again…

‘A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.’...

1. Time-wastes often result from overstaffing…

‘Specialists that may be needed once in a while, or that may have to be consulted on this or on that, should always remain outside. It is infinitely cheaper to go to them and consult them against a fee than to have them in the group to say nothing of the impact an underemployed but overskilled man has on the effectiveness of the entire group. All he can do is mischief.’

1. 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…

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done…

Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. Too many meetings signify that work that should be in one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and that information is not addressed to the people who need it…

1. The last major time-waster is malfunction in information… Even worse, but equally common, is information in the wrong form.

After this had been going on for about one year, I finally asked him, “Why always an hour and a half?” He answered, “That’s easy. I have found out that my attention span is about an hour and a half. If I work on any one topic longer than this, I begin to repeat myself. At the same time, I have learned that nothing of importance can really be tackled in much less time. One does not get to the point where one understands what one is talking about.

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.

The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

The final step in time management is therefore to consolidate the time that record and analysis show as normally available and under the executive’s control.

Effective executives start out by estimating how much discretionary time they can realistically call their own. Then they set aside continuous time in the appropriate amount. And if they find later that other matters encroach on this reserve, they scrutinize their record again and get rid of some more time demands from less than fully productive activities. They know that, as has been said before, one rarely overprunes.

And all effective executives control their time management perpetually. They not only keep a continuing log and analyze it periodically. They set themselves deadlines for the important activities, based on their judgment of their discretionary time.

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.

3. WHAT CAN I CONTRIBUTE?

“The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results. He is likely to have to think through what relationships his skills, his specialty, his function, or his department have to the entire organization and its purpose. He therefore will also come to think in terms of the customer, the client, or the patient, who is the ultimate reason for whatever the organization produces, whether it be economic goods, governmental policies, or health services. As a result, what he does and how he does it will be materially different.

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. If deprived of performance in any one of these areas, it will decay and die.

An executive’s focus on contribution by itself is a powerful force in developing people. People adjust to the level of the demands made on them. The executive who sets his sights on contribution, raises the sights and standards of everyone with whom he works.

Robert E. Sherwood, a most effective administrator in the large Office of War Information (and the author of one of the most perceptive books on effectiveness in power*) had been a playwright whose earlier “organization” had consisted of his own desk and typewriter.

If a man wants to be an executive—that is, if he wants to be considered responsible for his contribution—he has to concern himself with the usability of his “product”—that is, his knowledge.

Effective executives know this. For they are almost imperceptibly led by their upward orientation into finding out what the other fellow needs, what the other fellow sees, and what the other fellow understands. Effective executives find themselves asking other people in the organization, their superiors, their subordinates, but above all, their colleagues in other areas: “What contribution from me do you require to make your contribution to the organization? When do you need this, how do you need it, and in what form?

Executives in an organization do not have good human relations because they have a “talent for people.” They have good human relations because they focus on contribution in their own work and in their relationships with others. As a result, their relationships are productive—and this is the only valid definition of “good human relations.

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations:

• communications;

• teamwork;

• self-development; and

• development of others.

The question, “Who has to use my output for it to become effective?” immediately shows up the importance of people who are not in line of authority, either upward or downward, from and to the individual executive. It underlines what is the reality of a knowledge organization: The effective work is actually done in and by teams of people of diverse knowledges and skills. These people have to work together voluntarily and according to the logic of the situation and the demands of the task, rather than according to a formal jurisdictional structure.

The meeting, the report, or the presentation are the typical work situation of the executive. They are his specific, everyday tools. They also make great demands on his time—even if he succeeds in analyzing his time and in controlling whatever can be controlled.

“Whoever tries to place a man or staff an organization to avoid weakness will end up at best with mediocrity. The idea that there are “well-rounded” people, people who have only strengths and no weaknesses (whether the term used is the “whole man,” the “mature personality,” the “well-adjusted personality,” or the “generalist”) is a prescription for mediocrity if not for incompetence. Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of human knowledge, experience, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to be rated a total failure.

How then do effective executives staff for strength without stumbling into the opposite trap of building jobs to suit personality?

By and large they follow four rules:

1. They do not start out with the assumption that jobs are created by nature or by God. They know that they have been designed by highly fallible men. And they are therefore forever on guard against the “impossible” job, the job that simply is not for normal human beings… The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned… The effective executive therefore first makes sure that the job is well-designed. And if experience tells him otherwise, he does not hunt for genius to do the impossible. He redesigns the job. He knows that the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.

1. The second rule for staffing from strength is to make each job demanding and big. It should have challenge to bring out whatever strength a man may have. It should have scope so that any strength that is relevant to the task can produce significant results…The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle-age, soured, cynical, unproductive. Executives everywhere complain that many young men with fire in their bellies turn so soon into burned-out sticks. They have only themselves to blame: They quenched the fire by making the young man’s job too small.

1. Effective executives know that they have to start with what a man can do rather than with what a job requires. This, however, means that they do their thinking about people long before the decision on filling a job has to be made, and independently of it… For a superior to focus on weakness, as our appraisals require him to do, destroys the integrity of his relationship with his subordinates. The many executives who in effect sabotage the appraisals their policy manuals impose on them follow sound instinct… By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.

1. The effective executive knows that to get strength one has to put up with weaknesses… The effective executive will therefore ask: “Does this man have strength in .. major area? And is this strength relevant to the task? If he achieves excellence in this one area, will it make a significant difference?” And if the answer is “yes,” he will go ahead and appoint the man… They are above all intolerant of the argument: “I can’t spare this man; I’d be in trouble without him.” They have learned that there are only three explanations for an “indispensable man”: He is actually incompetent and can only survive if carefully shielded from demands; his strength is misused to bolster a weak superior who cannot stand on his own two feet; or his strength is misused to delay tackling a serious problem if not to conceal its existence.

The secret is that effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive…

But way beyond prudence, making the strength of the boss productive is a key to the subordinate’s own effectiveness. It enables him to focus his own contribution in such a way that it finds receptivity upstairs and will be put to use. It enables him to achieve and accomplish the things he himself believes in.

One does not make the strengths of the boss productive by toadying to him. One does it by starting out with what is right and presenting it in a form which is accessible to the superior.

The effective executive, therefore, asks: “What can my boss do really well?” “What has he done really well?” “What does he need to know to use his strength?” “What does he need to get from me to perform?” He does not worry too much over what the boss cannot do.

Few things make an executive as effective as building on the strengths of his superior.

“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.

Effective executives know that they have to get many things done—and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate—their own time and energy as well as that of their organization—on doing one thing at a time, and on doing first things first.

But one can at least try to limit one’s servitude to the past by cutting out those inherited activities and tasks that have ceased to promise results.

No one has much difficulty getting rid of the total failures. They liquidate themselves. Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on long beyond their productive life. Even more dangerous are the activities which should do well and which, for some reason or other, do not produce.

But while government is particularly endangered by organizational obesity, no organization is immune to the disease. The businessman in the large corporation who complains the loudest about bureaucracy in government may encourage in his own company the growth of “controls” which do not control anything, the proliferation of studies that are only a cover-up for his own unwillingness to face up to a decision, the inflation of all kinds of staffs for all kinds of research or “relations.

Social organizations need to stay lean and muscular as much as biological organisms.

But also, as every executive has learned, nothing new is easy. It always gets into trouble. Unless one has therefore built into the new endeavor the means for bailing it out when it runs into heavy weather, one condemns it to failure from the start. The only effective means for bailing out the new are people who have proven their capacity to perform. Such people are always already busier than they should be. Unless one relieves one of them of his present burden, one cannot expect him to take on the new task.

Systematic sloughing off of the old is the one and only way to force the new. There is no lack of ideas in any organization I know. “Creativity” is not our problem. But few organizations ever get going on their own good ideas. Everybody is much too busy on the tasks of yesterday. Putting all programs and activities regularly on trial for their lives and getting rid of those that cannot prove their productivity work wonders in stimulating creativity even in the most hidebound bureaucracy.

No task is completed until it has become part of organizational action and behavior. This almost always means that no task is completed unless other people have taken it on as their own, have accepted new ways of 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 postponable work, for it does not try to solve yesterday’s crises but to make a different tomorrow. And the pressures always favor yesterday. In particular, a top group which lets itself be controlled by the pressures will slight the one job no one else can do. It will not pay attention to the outside of the organization. It will therefore lose touch with the only reality, the only area in which there are results. For the pressures always favor what goes on inside. They always favor what has happened over the future, the crisis over the opportunity, the immediate and visible over the real, and the urgent over the relevant.

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.

“The big business, Sloan saw, needs unity of direction and central control. It needs its own top management with real powers. But it equally needs energy, enthusiasm, and strength in operations. The operating managers have to have the freedom to do things their own way. They have to have responsibility and the authority that goes with it. They have to have scope to show what they can do, and they have to get recognition for performance.

Sloan saw it as a constitutional problem to be solved through a new structure; decentralization which balances local autonomy in operations with central control of direction and policy.

They all tackled a problem at the highest conceptual level of understanding. They tried to think through what the decision was all about, and then tried to develop a principle for dealing with it. Their decisions were, in other words, strategic, rather than adaptations to the apparent needs of the moment.

The truly important features of the decisions Vail and Sloan made are neither their novelty nor their controversial nature. They are:

1. The clear realization that the problem was generic and could only be solved through a decision which established a rule, a principle;

1. The definition of the specifications which the answer to the problem had to satisfy, that is, of the “boundary conditions”;

1. The thinking through what is “right,” that is, the solution which will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is given to the compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to make the decision acceptable;

1. The building into the decision of the action to carry it out;

1. The “feedback” which tests the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the actual course of events.

These are the elements of the effective decision process.

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 concrete circumstances of the case. Truly unique events, however, must be treated individually. One cannot develop rules for the exceptional.

By far the most common mistake is to treat a generic situation as if it were a series of unique events; that is, to be pragmatic when one lacks the generic understanding and principle. This inevitably leads to frustration and futility.

Equally common is the mistake of treating a new event as if it were just another example of the old problem to which, therefore, the old rules should be applied.

Almost as common is the plausible but erroneous definition of the fundamental problem. Here is one example.

‘Since the end of World War II the American military services have been plagued by their inability to keep highly trained medical people in uniform. There have been dozens of studies and dozens of proposed remedies. However, all of the studies start out with the plausible hypothesis that pay is the problem—whereas the real problem lies in the traditional structure of military medicine. With its emphasis on the general practitioner, it is out of alignment with today’s medical profession, which stresses the specialist. The career ladder in military medicine leads from specialization to medical and hospital administration and away from research and specialized practice. Today’s young, well-trained physicians, therefore, feel that they waste their time and skill in the military service where they either have to work as general practitioners or become chairbound administrators. They want the opportunity to develop the skills and apply the practice of today’s highly scientific, specialized doctor.

So far the military has not faced up to the basic decision. Are the armed services willing to settle for a second-rate medical organization staffed with people who cannot make the grade in the highly scientific, research-oriented, and highly specialized civilian profession of medicine? Or are they willing and able to organize the practice of medicine within the services in ways that differ fundamentally from the organization and structure of a military service? Until the military accepts this as the real decision, its young doctors will keep on leaving as soon as they can.

Or the definition of the problem may be incomplete.

The effective decision-maker, therefore, always assumes initially that the problem is generic.

He always assumes that the event that clamors for his attention is in reality a symptom. He looks for the true problem. He is not content with doctoring the symptom alone.

And if the event is truly unique, the experienced decisionmaker suspects that this heralds a new underlying problem and that what appears as unique will turn out to have been simply the first manifestation of a new generic situation.

One of the most obvious facts of social and political life is the longevity of the temporary. British licensing hours for taverns, for instance, French rent controls, or Washington “temporary” government buildings, all three hastily developed in World War I to last “a few months of temporary emergency” are still with us fifty years later. The effective decision-maker knows this. He too improvises, of course. But he asks himself every time, “If I had to live with this for a long time, would I be willing to?” And if the answer is “No,” he keeps on working to find a more general, a more conceptual, a more comprehensive solution— one which establishes the right principle.

As a result, the effective executive does not make many decisions. But the reason is not that he takes too long in making one—in fact, a decision on principle does not, as a rule, take longer than a decision on symptoms and expediency. The effective executive does not need to make many decisions. Because he solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule; that is, by adaptation. “A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers,” says an old legal proverb. It is a country which attempts to solve every problem as a unique phenomenon, rather than as a special case under general rules of law. Similarly, an executive who makes many decisions is both lazy and ineffectual.

The mistake was failure to think through clearly the boundary conditions that the decision had to satisfy, and refusal to face up to the unpleasant reality that a decision that has to satisfy two different and at bottom incompatible specifications is not a decision but a prayer for a miracle.

Don’t you worry about whether we will like this or dislike that. And don’t you, above all, concern yourself with the compromises that might be needed to make your recommendations acceptable. There is not one executive in this company who does not know how to make every single conceivable compromise without any help from you. But he can’t make the right compromise unless you first tell him what ‘right’ is.” The executive thinking through a decision might put this in front of himself in neon lights.

It is fruitless and a waste of time to worry about what is acceptable and what one had better not say so as not to evoke resistance. The things one worries about never happen. And objections and difficulties no one thought about suddenly turn out to be almost insurmountable obstacles. One gains nothing in other words by starting out with the question: “What is acceptable?” And in the process of answering it, one gives away the important things, as a rule, and loses any chance to come up with an effective, let alone with the right, answer.

Converting the decision into action is the fourth major element in the decision process. While thinking through the boundary conditions is the most difficult step in decision-making, converting the decision into effective action is usually the most time-consuming one. Yet a decision will not become effective unless the action commitments have been built into the decision from the start.

In fact, no decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.

Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.

All this becomes doubly important when people have to change behavior, habits, or attitudes if a decision is to become effective action. Here one has to make sure not only that responsibility for the action is clearly assigned and that the people responsible are capable of doing the needful. One has to make sure that their measurements, their standards for accomplishment, and their incentives are changed simultaneously. Otherwise, the people will get caught in a paralyzing internal emotional conflict.

If the greatest rewards are given for behavior contrary to that which the new course of action requires, then everyone will conclude that this contrary behavior is what the people at the top really want and are going to reward.

Not everyone can do what Vail did and build the execution of his decisions into the decision itself. But everyone can think what action commitments a specific decision requires, what work assignments follow from it, and what people are available to carry it out.

Finally, a feedback has to be built into the decision to provide a continuous testing, against actual events, of the expectations that underlie the decision.

Decisions are made by men. Men are fallible; at their best their works do not last long. Even the best decision has a high probability of being wrong. Even the most effective one eventually becomes obsolete.

“A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a “subject,” but a self-discipline. But throughout this book, and implicit in its structure and in the way it treats its subject matter, is always the question: “What makes for effectiveness in an organization and in any of the major areas of an executive’s day and work?” Only rarely is the question asked: “Why should there be effectiveness?” The goal of effectiveness is taken for granted.

Even more important is the social need for executive effectiveness. The cohesion and strength of our society depend increasingly on the integration of the psychological and social needs of the knowledge worker with the goals of organization and of industrial society.

He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.

Management books usually deal with managing other people. The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness. That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven. But one can always manage oneself. Indeed, executives who do not manage themselves for effectiveness cannot possibly expect to manage their associates and subordinates. Management is largely by example. Executives who do not know how to make themselves effective in their own job and work set the wrong example.

In forty-five years of work as a consultant with a large number of executives in a wide variety of organizations—large and small; businesses, government agencies, labor unions, hospitals, universities, community services; American, European, Latin American and Japanese—I have not come across a single “natural”: an executive who was born effective. All the effective ones have had to learn to be effective. And all of them then had to practice effectiveness until it became habit. But all the ones who worked on making themselves effective executives succeeded in doing so. Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned.

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.

The first practice is to ask what needs to be done. Note that the question is not “What do I want to do?” Asking what has to be done, and taking the question seriously, is crucial for managerial success. Failure to ask this question will render even the ablest executive ineffectual.

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. Of course they know that shareholders, employees, and executives are important constituencies who have to support a decision, or at least acquiesce in it, if the choice is to be effective…

Asking “What is right for the enterprise?” does not guarantee that the right decision will be made. Even the most brilliant executive is human and thus prone to mistakes and prejudices. But failure to ask the question virtually guarantees the wrong decision.

Executives are doers; they execute. Knowledge is useless to executives, until it has been translated into deeds. But before springing into action, the executive needs to plan his course. He needs to think about desired results, probable restraints, future revisions, check-in points, and implications for how he’ll spend his time.

[The action plan] should be revised often, because every success creates new opportunities. So does every failure. The same is true for changes in the business environment, in the market, and especially in people within the enterprise—all these changes demand that the plan be revised.

Finally, the action plan has to become the basis for the executive’s time management. Time is an executive’s scariest and most precious resource. And organisations—whether government agencies, businesses, or nonprofits—are inherently time wasters. The action plan will prove useless unless it’s allowed to determine how the executive spends his or her time.

Take responsibility for decisions

• A decision has not been made until people know:

• The name of the person accountable for carrying it out;

• the deadline;

• the names of the people who will be affected by the decision and therefore have to know about, understand, and approve it—or at least not be strongly opposed to it—and

• the names of the people who have to be informed of the decision, even if they are not directly affected by it.

Focus on opportunities

Good executives focus on opportunities rather than problems. Problems have to be taken care of, of course; they must not be swept under the rug. But problem solving, however necessary, does not produce results. It prevents damage. Exploring opportunities produces results.

Specifically, executives scan these seven situations for opportunities:

• an unexpected success or failure in their own enterprise, in a competing enterprise, or in the industry;

• a gap between what is and what could be in market, process, product, or service (for example, in the nineteenth century, the paper industry concentrated on the 10% of each tree that became wood pulp and totally neglected the possibilities in the remaining 90%, which became waste);

• innovation in a process, product or service, whether inside or outside the enterprise or its industry;

• changes in industry structure and market structure;

• demographics;

• changes in mind-set, values, perception, mood, or meaning; and

• new knowledge or a new technology.

Unless there is a true catastrophe, problems are not discussed in management meetings until opportunities have been analyszed and properly dealt with.

Effective executives put their best people on opportunities rather than on problems. One way to staff for opportunities is to ask each member of the management group to prepare two lists every six months—a list of opportunities for the entire enterprise and a list of the best-performing people throughout the enterprise.

Good follow-up is just as important as the meeting itself. The great master of follow-up was Alfred Sloan, the most effective business executive I have ever known.

“Yet men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs. High intelligence is common enough among executives. Imagination is far from rare. The level of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge. Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work. Conversely, in every organization there are some highly effective plodders

The realities of the executive’s situation both demand effectiveness from him and make effectiveness exceedingly difficult to achieve. Indeed, unless executives work at becoming effective, the realities of their situation will push them into futility.

The executive in organization is in an entirely different position. In his situation there are four major realities over which he has essentially no control. Every one of them is built into organization and into the executive’s day and work. He has no choice but to “cooperate with the inevitable.” But every one of these realities exerts pressure toward nonresults and nonperformance.

1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else. If one attempted to define an “executive” operationally (that is, through his activities) one would have to define him as a captive of the organization. Everybody can move in on his time, and everybody does…

1. Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work… The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does…

But events rarely tell the executive anything, let alone the real problem… If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.” He may be an excellent man. But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved…

1. The third reality pushing the executive toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization. This means that he is effective only if and when other people make use of what he contributes…

1. Finally, the executive is within an organization. Every executive, whether his organization is a business or a research laboratory, a government agency, a large university, or the air force, sees the inside—the organization—as close and immediate reality. He sees the outside only through thick and distorting lenses, if at all. What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality.

The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment.

But it is the inside of the organization that is most visible to the executive. It is the inside that has immediacy for him. Its relations and contacts, its problems and challenges, its crosscurrents and gossip reach him and touch him at every point. Unless he makes special efforts to gain direct access to outside reality, he will become increasingly inside-focused. The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside.

Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i.e., event) rather than fact (i.e., after the event). The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.

These four realities the executive cannot change. They are necessary conditions of his existence. But he must therefore assume that he will be ineffectual unless he makes special efforts to learn to be effective.

Effectiveness, in other words, is a habit; that is, a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well. They have to be acquired, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is, repeated ad nauseam until “6 x 6 = 36” has become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.

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.

1. 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.

1. 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. They do not build on weakness. They do not start out with the things they cannot do.

1. Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results. They force themselves to set priorities and stay with their priority decisions. They know that they have no choice but to do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done.

1. Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions. They know that this is, above all, a matter of system—of the right steps in the right sequence. They know that an effective decision is always a judgment based on “dissenting opinions” rather than on “consensus on the facts.” And they know that to make many decisions fast means to make the wrong decisions. What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

These are the elements of executive effectiveness—and these are the subjects of this book.

“Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process:

• recording time,

• managing time, and

• consolidating time

is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

Everything requires time. It is the one truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

To be effective, every knowledge worker, and especially every executive, therefore needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks. To have small dribs and drabs of time at his disposal will not be sufficient even if the total is an impressive number of hours.

This is particularly true with respect to time spent working with people, which is, of course, a central task in the work of the executive. People are time-consumers. And most people are time-wasters.

To spend a few minutes with people is simply not productive. If one wants to get anything across, one has to spend a fairly large minimum quantum of time. The manager who thinks that he can discuss the plans, direction, and performance of one of his subordinates in fifteen minutes—and many managers believe this—is just deceiving himself. If one wants to get to the point of having an impact, one needs probably at least an hour and usually much more. And if one has to establish a human relationship, one needs infinitely more time.

One has to sit down with a knowledge worker and think through with him what should be done and why, before one can even know whether he is doing a satisfactory job or not. And this is time-consuming.

Since the knowledge worker directs himself, he must understand what achievement is expected of him and why. He must also understand the work of the people who have to use his knowledge output. For this, he needs a good deal of information, discussion, instruction—all things that take time. And contrary to common belief, this time demand is made not only on his superior but equally on his colleagues.

People must feel that “we have all the time in the world.” This actually means that one gets a great deal done fast. But it means also that one has to make available a good deal of time in one chunk and without too much interruption.

Mixing personal relations and work relations is time-consuming. If hurried, it turns into friction. Yet any organization rests on this mixture. The more people are together, the more time will their sheer interaction take, the less time will be available to them for work, accomplishment, and results.

Among the effective executives I have had occasion to observe, there have been people who make decisions fast, and people who make them rather slowly. But without exception, they make personnel decisions slowly and they make them several times before they really commit themselves.

Systematic time management is therefore the next step. One has to find the nonproductive, time-wasting activities and get rid of them if one possibly can. This requires asking oneself a number of diagnostic questions.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever. 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. …

1. The next question is: “Which of the activities on my time log could be done by somebody else just as well, if not better?” … “Delegation” as the term is customarily used, is a misunderstanding—is indeed misdirection. But getting rid of anything that can be done by somebody else so that one does not have to delegate but can really get to one’s own work—that is a major improvement in effectiveness.

1. 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. There is no one symptom for this. But there is still a simple way to find out. That is to ask other people. Effective executives have learned to ask systematically and without coyness: “What do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?” To ask this question, and to ask it without being afraid of the truth, is a mark of the effective executive…

Now, however, he [the senior financial executive] satisfies the status needs of his subordinates in a different manner. He sends out a printed form which reads: “I have asked [Messrs Smith, Jones, and Robinson] to meet with me [Wednesday at 3] in [the fourth floor conference room] to discuss budget. Please come if you think that you need the information or want to take part in the discussion. But you will in any event receive right away a full summary of the discussion and of any decisions reached, together with a request for your comments.” Where formerly a dozen people came and stayed all afternoon, three men and a secretary to take the notes now get the matter over with within an hour or so. And no one feels left out.’

Many executives know all about these unproductive and unnecessary time demands; yet they are afraid to prune them. They are afraid to cut out something important by mistake. But this mistake, if made, can be speedily corrected. If one prunes too harshly, one usually finds out fast enough.

Managers, however, need to be equally concerned with time-loss that results from poor management and deficient organization. Poor management wastes everybody’s time—but above all, it wastes the manager’s time.

1. The first task here is to identify the time-wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight. The symptom to look for is the recurrent “crisis,” the crisis that comes back year after year. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again…

‘A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is “dramatic,” a factory in which the “epic of industry” is unfolded before the visitor’s eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.’...

1. Time-wastes often result from overstaffing…

‘Specialists that may be needed once in a while, or that may have to be consulted on this or on that, should always remain outside. It is infinitely cheaper to go to them and consult them against a fee than to have them in the group to say nothing of the impact an underemployed but overskilled man has on the effectiveness of the entire group. All he can do is mischief.’

1. 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…

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done…

Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. Too many meetings signify that work that should be in one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and that information is not addressed to the people who need it…

1. The last major time-waster is malfunction in information… Even worse, but equally common, is information in the wrong form.

After this had been going on for about one year, I finally asked him, “Why always an hour and a half?” He answered, “That’s easy. I have found out that my attention span is about an hour and a half. If I work on any one topic longer than this, I begin to repeat myself. At the same time, I have learned that nothing of importance can really be tackled in much less time. One does not get to the point where one understands what one is talking about.

Whenever I see a senior executive asserting that more than half his time is under his control and is really discretionary time which he invests and spends according to his own judgment, I am reasonably certain that he has no idea where his time goes. Senior executives rarely have as much as one quarter of their time truly at their disposal and available for the important matters, the matters that contribute, the matters they are being paid for. This is true in any organization except that in the government agency the unproductive time demands on the top people tend to be even higher than they are in other large organizations.

The effective executive therefore knows that he has to consolidate his discretionary time. He knows that he needs large chunks of time and that small driblets are no time at all. Even one quarter of the working day, if consolidated in large time units, is usually enough to get the important things done. But even three quarters of the working day are useless if they are only available as fifteen minutes here or half an hour there.

The final step in time management is therefore to consolidate the time that record and analysis show as normally available and under the executive’s control.

Effective executives start out by estimating how much discretionary time they can realistically call their own. Then they set aside continuous time in the appropriate amount. And if they find later that other matters encroach on this reserve, they scrutinize their record again and get rid of some more time demands from less than fully productive activities. They know that, as has been said before, one rarely overprunes.

And all effective executives control their time management perpetually. They not only keep a continuing log and analyze it periodically. They set themselves deadlines for the important activities, based on their judgment of their discretionary time.

Time is the scarcest resource, and unless it is managed, nothing else can be managed. The analysis of one’s time, moreover, is the one easily accessible and yet systematic way to analyze one’s work and to think through what really matters in it.

3. WHAT CAN I CONTRIBUTE?

“The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, is in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management.” He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.

The focus on contribution turns the executive’s attention away from his own specialty, his own narrow skills, his own department, and toward the performance of the whole. It turns his attention to the outside, the only place where there are results. He is likely to have to think through what relationships his skills, his specialty, his function, or his department have to the entire organization and its purpose. He therefore will also come to think in terms of the customer, the client, or the patient, who is the ultimate reason for whatever the organization produces, whether it be economic goods, governmental policies, or health services. As a result, what he does and how he does it will be materially different.

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. If deprived of performance in any one of these areas, it will decay and die.

An executive’s focus on contribution by itself is a powerful force in developing people. People adjust to the level of the demands made on them. The executive who sets his sights on contribution, raises the sights and standards of everyone with whom he works.

Robert E. Sherwood, a most effective administrator in the large Office of War Information (and the author of one of the most perceptive books on effectiveness in power*) had been a playwright whose earlier “organization” had consisted of his own desk and typewriter.

If a man wants to be an executive—that is, if he wants to be considered responsible for his contribution—he has to concern himself with the usability of his “product”—that is, his knowledge.

Effective executives know this. For they are almost imperceptibly led by their upward orientation into finding out what the other fellow needs, what the other fellow sees, and what the other fellow understands. Effective executives find themselves asking other people in the organization, their superiors, their subordinates, but above all, their colleagues in other areas: “What contribution from me do you require to make your contribution to the organization? When do you need this, how do you need it, and in what form?

Executives in an organization do not have good human relations because they have a “talent for people.” They have good human relations because they focus on contribution in their own work and in their relationships with others. As a result, their relationships are productive—and this is the only valid definition of “good human relations.

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations:

• communications;

• teamwork;

• self-development; and

• development of others.

The question, “Who has to use my output for it to become effective?” immediately shows up the importance of people who are not in line of authority, either upward or downward, from and to the individual executive. It underlines what is the reality of a knowledge organization: The effective work is actually done in and by teams of people of diverse knowledges and skills. These people have to work together voluntarily and according to the logic of the situation and the demands of the task, rather than according to a formal jurisdictional structure.

The meeting, the report, or the presentation are the typical work situation of the executive. They are his specific, everyday tools. They also make great demands on his time—even if he succeeds in analyzing his time and in controlling whatever can be controlled.

“Whoever tries to place a man or staff an organization to avoid weakness will end up at best with mediocrity. The idea that there are “well-rounded” people, people who have only strengths and no weaknesses (whether the term used is the “whole man,” the “mature personality,” the “well-adjusted personality,” or the “generalist”) is a prescription for mediocrity if not for incompetence. Strong people always have strong weaknesses too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys. And no one is strong in many areas. Measured against the universe of human knowledge, experience, and abilities, even the greatest genius would have to be rated a total failure.

How then do effective executives staff for strength without stumbling into the opposite trap of building jobs to suit personality?

By and large they follow four rules:

1. They do not start out with the assumption that jobs are created by nature or by God. They know that they have been designed by highly fallible men. And they are therefore forever on guard against the “impossible” job, the job that simply is not for normal human beings… The rule is simple: Any job that has defeated two or three men in succession, even though each had performed well in his previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings. It must be redesigned… The effective executive therefore first makes sure that the job is well-designed. And if experience tells him otherwise, he does not hunt for genius to do the impossible. He redesigns the job. He knows that the test of organization is not genius. It is its capacity to make common people achieve uncommon performance.

1. The second rule for staffing from strength is to make each job demanding and big. It should have challenge to bring out whatever strength a man may have. It should have scope so that any strength that is relevant to the task can produce significant results…The young knowledge worker whose job is too small to challenge and test his abilities either leaves or declines rapidly into premature middle-age, soured, cynical, unproductive. Executives everywhere complain that many young men with fire in their bellies turn so soon into burned-out sticks. They have only themselves to blame: They quenched the fire by making the young man’s job too small.

1. Effective executives know that they have to start with what a man can do rather than with what a job requires. This, however, means that they do their thinking about people long before the decision on filling a job has to be made, and independently of it… For a superior to focus on weakness, as our appraisals require him to do, destroys the integrity of his relationship with his subordinates. The many executives who in effect sabotage the appraisals their policy manuals impose on them follow sound instinct… By themselves, character and integrity do not accomplish anything. But their absence faults everything else. Here, therefore, is the one area where weakness is a disqualification by itself rather than a limitation on performance capacity and strength.

1. The effective executive knows that to get strength one has to put up with weaknesses… The effective executive will therefore ask: “Does this man have strength in .. major area? And is this strength relevant to the task? If he achieves excellence in this one area, will it make a significant difference?” And if the answer is “yes,” he will go ahead and appoint the man… They are above all intolerant of the argument: “I can’t spare this man; I’d be in trouble without him.” They have learned that there are only three explanations for an “indispensable man”: He is actually incompetent and can only survive if carefully shielded from demands; his strength is misused to bolster a weak superior who cannot stand on his own two feet; or his strength is misused to delay tackling a serious problem if not to conceal its existence.

The secret is that effective executives make the strengths of the boss productive…

But way beyond prudence, making the strength of the boss productive is a key to the subordinate’s own effectiveness. It enables him to focus his own contribution in such a way that it finds receptivity upstairs and will be put to use. It enables him to achieve and accomplish the things he himself believes in.

One does not make the strengths of the boss productive by toadying to him. One does it by starting out with what is right and presenting it in a form which is accessible to the superior.

The effective executive, therefore, asks: “What can my boss do really well?” “What has he done really well?” “What does he need to know to use his strength?” “What does he need to get from me to perform?” He does not worry too much over what the boss cannot do.

Few things make an executive as effective as building on the strengths of his superior.

“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.

Effective executives know that they have to get many things done—and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate—their own time and energy as well as that of their organization—on doing one thing at a time, and on doing first things first.

But one can at least try to limit one’s servitude to the past by cutting out those inherited activities and tasks that have ceased to promise results.

No one has much difficulty getting rid of the total failures. They liquidate themselves. Yesterday’s successes, however, always linger on long beyond their productive life. Even more dangerous are the activities which should do well and which, for some reason or other, do not produce.

But while government is particularly endangered by organizational obesity, no organization is immune to the disease. The businessman in the large corporation who complains the loudest about bureaucracy in government may encourage in his own company the growth of “controls” which do not control anything, the proliferation of studies that are only a cover-up for his own unwillingness to face up to a decision, the inflation of all kinds of staffs for all kinds of research or “relations.

Social organizations need to stay lean and muscular as much as biological organisms.

But also, as every executive has learned, nothing new is easy. It always gets into trouble. Unless one has therefore built into the new endeavor the means for bailing it out when it runs into heavy weather, one condemns it to failure from the start. The only effective means for bailing out the new are people who have proven their capacity to perform. Such people are always already busier than they should be. Unless one relieves one of them of his present burden, one cannot expect him to take on the new task.

Systematic sloughing off of the old is the one and only way to force the new. There is no lack of ideas in any organization I know. “Creativity” is not our problem. But few organizations ever get going on their own good ideas. Everybody is much too busy on the tasks of yesterday. Putting all programs and activities regularly on trial for their lives and getting rid of those that cannot prove their productivity work wonders in stimulating creativity even in the most hidebound bureaucracy.

No task is completed until it has become part of organizational action and behavior. This almost always means that no task is completed unless other people have taken it on as their own, have accepted new ways of 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 postponable work, for it does not try to solve yesterday’s crises but to make a different tomorrow. And the pressures always favor yesterday. In particular, a top group which lets itself be controlled by the pressures will slight the one job no one else can do. It will not pay attention to the outside of the organization. It will therefore lose touch with the only reality, the only area in which there are results. For the pressures always favor what goes on inside. They always favor what has happened over the future, the crisis over the opportunity, the immediate and visible over the real, and the urgent over the relevant.

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.

“The big business, Sloan saw, needs unity of direction and central control. It needs its own top management with real powers. But it equally needs energy, enthusiasm, and strength in operations. The operating managers have to have the freedom to do things their own way. They have to have responsibility and the authority that goes with it. They have to have scope to show what they can do, and they have to get recognition for performance.

Sloan saw it as a constitutional problem to be solved through a new structure; decentralization which balances local autonomy in operations with central control of direction and policy.

They all tackled a problem at the highest conceptual level of understanding. They tried to think through what the decision was all about, and then tried to develop a principle for dealing with it. Their decisions were, in other words, strategic, rather than adaptations to the apparent needs of the moment.

The truly important features of the decisions Vail and Sloan made are neither their novelty nor their controversial nature. They are:

1. The clear realization that the problem was generic and could only be solved through a decision which established a rule, a principle;

1. The definition of the specifications which the answer to the problem had to satisfy, that is, of the “boundary conditions”;

1. The thinking through what is “right,” that is, the solution which will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is given to the compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to make the decision acceptable;

1. The building into the decision of the action to carry it out;

1. The “feedback” which tests the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the actual course of events.

These are the elements of the effective decision process.

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 concrete circumstances of the case. Truly unique events, however, must be treated individually. One cannot develop rules for the exceptional.

By far the most common mistake is to treat a generic situation as if it were a series of unique events; that is, to be pragmatic when one lacks the generic understanding and principle. This inevitably leads to frustration and futility.

Equally common is the mistake of treating a new event as if it were just another example of the old problem to which, therefore, the old rules should be applied.

Almost as common is the plausible but erroneous definition of the fundamental problem. Here is one example.

‘Since the end of World War II the American military services have been plagued by their inability to keep highly trained medical people in uniform. There have been dozens of studies and dozens of proposed remedies. However, all of the studies start out with the plausible hypothesis that pay is the problem—whereas the real problem lies in the traditional structure of military medicine. With its emphasis on the general practitioner, it is out of alignment with today’s medical profession, which stresses the specialist. The career ladder in military medicine leads from specialization to medical and hospital administration and away from research and specialized practice. Today’s young, well-trained physicians, therefore, feel that they waste their time and skill in the military service where they either have to work as general practitioners or become chairbound administrators. They want the opportunity to develop the skills and apply the practice of today’s highly scientific, specialized doctor.

So far the military has not faced up to the basic decision. Are the armed services willing to settle for a second-rate medical organization staffed with people who cannot make the grade in the highly scientific, research-oriented, and highly specialized civilian profession of medicine? Or are they willing and able to organize the practice of medicine within the services in ways that differ fundamentally from the organization and structure of a military service? Until the military accepts this as the real decision, its young doctors will keep on leaving as soon as they can.

Or the definition of the problem may be incomplete.

The effective decision-maker, therefore, always assumes initially that the problem is generic.

He always assumes that the event that clamors for his attention is in reality a symptom. He looks for the true problem. He is not content with doctoring the symptom alone.

And if the event is truly unique, the experienced decisionmaker suspects that this heralds a new underlying problem and that what appears as unique will turn out to have been simply the first manifestation of a new generic situation.

One of the most obvious facts of social and political life is the longevity of the temporary. British licensing hours for taverns, for instance, French rent controls, or Washington “temporary” government buildings, all three hastily developed in World War I to last “a few months of temporary emergency” are still with us fifty years later. The effective decision-maker knows this. He too improvises, of course. But he asks himself every time, “If I had to live with this for a long time, would I be willing to?” And if the answer is “No,” he keeps on working to find a more general, a more conceptual, a more comprehensive solution— one which establishes the right principle.

As a result, the effective executive does not make many decisions. But the reason is not that he takes too long in making one—in fact, a decision on principle does not, as a rule, take longer than a decision on symptoms and expediency. The effective executive does not need to make many decisions. Because he solves generic situations through a rule and policy, he can handle most events as cases under the rule; that is, by adaptation. “A country with many laws is a country of incompetent lawyers,” says an old legal proverb. It is a country which attempts to solve every problem as a unique phenomenon, rather than as a special case under general rules of law. Similarly, an executive who makes many decisions is both lazy and ineffectual.

The mistake was failure to think through clearly the boundary conditions that the decision had to satisfy, and refusal to face up to the unpleasant reality that a decision that has to satisfy two different and at bottom incompatible specifications is not a decision but a prayer for a miracle.

Don’t you worry about whether we will like this or dislike that. And don’t you, above all, concern yourself with the compromises that might be needed to make your recommendations acceptable. There is not one executive in this company who does not know how to make every single conceivable compromise without any help from you. But he can’t make the right compromise unless you first tell him what ‘right’ is.” The executive thinking through a decision might put this in front of himself in neon lights.

It is fruitless and a waste of time to worry about what is acceptable and what one had better not say so as not to evoke resistance. The things one worries about never happen. And objections and difficulties no one thought about suddenly turn out to be almost insurmountable obstacles. One gains nothing in other words by starting out with the question: “What is acceptable?” And in the process of answering it, one gives away the important things, as a rule, and loses any chance to come up with an effective, let alone with the right, answer.

Converting the decision into action is the fourth major element in the decision process. While thinking through the boundary conditions is the most difficult step in decision-making, converting the decision into effective action is usually the most time-consuming one. Yet a decision will not become effective unless the action commitments have been built into the decision from the start.

In fact, no decision has been made unless carrying it out in specific steps has become someone’s work assignment and responsibility. Until then, there are only good intentions.

Converting a decision into action requires answering several distinct questions: Who has to know of this decision? What action has to be taken? Who is to take it? And what does the action have to be so that the people who have to do it can do it? The first and the last of these are too often overlooked—with dire results.

All this becomes doubly important when people have to change behavior, habits, or attitudes if a decision is to become effective action. Here one has to make sure not only that responsibility for the action is clearly assigned and that the people responsible are capable of doing the needful. One has to make sure that their measurements, their standards for accomplishment, and their incentives are changed simultaneously. Otherwise, the people will get caught in a paralyzing internal emotional conflict.

If the greatest rewards are given for behavior contrary to that which the new course of action requires, then everyone will conclude that this contrary behavior is what the people at the top really want and are going to reward.

Not everyone can do what Vail did and build the execution of his decisions into the decision itself. But everyone can think what action commitments a specific decision requires, what work assignments follow from it, and what people are available to carry it out.

Finally, a feedback has to be built into the decision to provide a continuous testing, against actual events, of the expectations that underlie the decision.

Decisions are made by men. Men are fallible; at their best their works do not last long. Even the best decision has a high probability of being wrong. Even the most effective one eventually becomes obsolete.

“A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between “almost right” and “probably wrong”—but much more often a choice between two courses of action neither of which is provably more nearly right than the other.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a “subject,” but a self-discipline. But throughout this book, and implicit in its structure and in the way it treats its subject matter, is always the question: “What makes for effectiveness in an organization and in any of the major areas of an executive’s day and work?” Only rarely is the question asked: “Why should there be effectiveness?” The goal of effectiveness is taken for granted.

Even more important is the social need for executive effectiveness. The cohesion and strength of our society depend increasingly on the integration of the psychological and social needs of the knowledge worker with the goals of organization and of industrial society.

He is in danger of alienation, to use the fashionable word for boredom, frustration, and silent despair.