I’d absolutely recommend this book. For one, it’s short. So many nonfiction books take 300-400 pages to say the same thing over and over, but Drucker gets it done in around 200 (and it’s well written too). It still took me a long time to read though because I kept putting it down to be sure I fully absorbed what he was saying. The gist of the book is that executives (and knowledge workers in general) are paid to be effective, and that effectiveness can be learned. Effectiveness, he says, comes down to getting the right things done. Plain and simple. It’s not the quantity of work, or the appearance of business, but results that matter. And then he prescribes several ways to be more effective.
I’m keeping this book on my shelf to lend to friends, and reread in the future as a reminder of good leadership habits. I want to develop other qualities as time goes on, but for now, the one that hit closest to home was his insistence that effective executives can only do one thing at a time if they are going to do it well. I’ve historically had a habit of trying to do too many things at once, and I now realize that most of my success with past projects was in spite of, rather than because of my split attention (and that most of my abandoned projects failed to flourish because each one received maybe a third of the love they needed).
Too, I think there’s something about having only one project on your mind that provides greater benefits than you would get from the sum of many smaller projects. My dad always said his brain would solve problems in his sleep when he was focused on them, and while I don’t like the idea of falling asleep in that state of mind, I think this is a real thing.
I think we often think the best way to do new things is part-time, so as to spread the risk around, but I think instead it might be smarter and safer to go all-in and to figure things out from there. You’ll learn faster, you’ll solve more problems that way, and your odds of failure will go down because you’ll be more likely to consider, and mitigate possible risks (as well as to find the key element that really works and drives success). So this is the one practice that I’m working on now.
Another one that I thought was interesting, was the process by which great leaders choose where to focus their time. It absolutely has to be focused (as mentioned above), but the decision has far less to do with the executive’s agenda than it does with the circumstance they find themselves in. Effective leaders ask, “what am I uniquely well suited to accomplish in this role?” rather than “what do I want to get done?” If that piques your interest, read the book, he gives better examples and explains them better than I can here.
Along these lines, Drucker also talks about hiring for strength, rather than absence of weakness. It seems like all the stories I’ve heard about excellent companies and organizations have had a certain “rag-tag” quality to them, which doesn’t seem like such an accident to me now. In an organization, as Drucker argues, you have specific functions you need done. If the woman in accounting is a socially inept numbers-wiz, she’s the right one for the job, however hard it is to make small talk in the elevator. The best use of resources is to hire people for those specific functions, rather than hire good “all-around” people and try to coach them into that role. The square peg jammed into the round hole won’t be good at their job or happy.
Throughout the book, he stresses the importance of worker happiness and satisfaction for an organization of knowledge workers to be truly successful. I’m glad this is seems to be gaining momentum, at least in the tech world.
There are a ton of other things he talks about that struck me as incredibly prescient, despite being written in 1965. I’ll leave you with one: “The knowledge worker,…is rapidly becoming the major resource of the developed countries. He is becoming the major investment; for education is the most expensive investment of them all. He is becoming the major cost center. To make the knowledge worker productive is the specific economic need of an industrially developed society. In such a society, the manual worker is not competitive in his costs with manual workers in underdeveloped or developing countries. Only productivity of the knowledge worker can make it possible for developed countries to maintain their high standard of living against the competition of low-wage, developing economies.
So far, only a superoptimist would be reassured as to the productivity of the knowledge worker in the industrially developed countries. The tremendous shift of the center of gravity in the work force from manual to knowledge work has not, I submit, shown extraordinary results.” So much time has been spent harping on outsourcing, and the US losing jobs to the rest of the world. But all of that only amounts to blaming other countries and workers (who are literally hungrier for work than we are) for our own failure to develop our intellectual capital. So much of employee life is repetitive (read: automatable) but people don’t think about what to automate, or they associate it with job destruction (it is, but job destruction is good). We need to free people up for more productive work. Work that is creative, and that leverages technology…This, by definition, is the kind of work done by entrepreneurs, and even entrepreneurially minded organizations. We add the most value and enjoy our work most in these kinds of roles; no one likes pencil pushing, and we don’t need people for it, we have machines so that people can add value at the margin.
I feel like my own productivity is much higher on my own than within an organization. On my own, I use technology much more fully and resourcefully, and readily reinvest in my education by learning new skills to allow myself to do more! I feel like, rather than working as a specialist who plugs their skills into an existing organization niche, I’m better suited to create the framework of an organization.