fuchsbau

The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker

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• Substrat: "do first things first - and second things not at all."
  • what is considered excellent is often a pale shadow of the true potential
  • The less an organization does to produce results, the better it does its job.
  • What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions.
  • two mediocrities achieve less than one—they get in each other’s way.
  • Unless one has considered alternatives, one has a closed mind.
• Definitions:
  • Effectiveness: get the right things done.
  • Efficiency: do things right.
  • Executives: knowledge workers/managers/individual professionals who are expected to make decisions that have significant impact on the performance and results of the whole.
  • Time wasters: overstaffing, malorganisation, malfunction in information
• Effective executives 1) know where their time goes, 2) focus on outward contribution, 3) build on strenghts, 4) concentrate on areas where performance produces outsized results, 5) make effective decisions.
• Knowledge work: "(...) cannot be supervised closely or in detail. [The knowledge worker] can only be helped."
  • Since the knowledge worker directs himself, he must understand what achievement is expected of him and why.
• zero drafts: block a significant amount of time at the start.
• trim activities: systematic sloughing off of the old is the one way to force the new.
  • "We rightly consider keeping many balls in the air a circus stunt. Yet even the juggler does it only for ten minutes or so. If he were to try doing it longer, he would soon drop all the balls."