Review: The Effective Executive, Peter Drucker
This book can be summed up in the following.
Premise: It is the executive's job to be effective, and effectiveness can be learned.
The lessons to learn effectiveness are:
1. Managing time
2. Contributing to results
3. Making strengths productive
4. Setting the right priorities
5. Making decisions
Drucker is obviously a brilliant mind, and anyone who works in an organization (everyone?) would benefit from his ideas. Unfortunately, the books is about as exciting as a book about "organizational management" sounds. Especially after picking Charles Duhigg's book The Power of Habits, I am reminded how much of a difference one's writing style can make. Drucker's skill in the knowledge economy is, indeed, evidence-based organizational theory, not story-telling.
That said, I can certainly understand how his insights into management have influenced big organizations. He has codified some key principles so that people like me are able to understand what is required for an organization to achieve great things, and also create a situation where a huge number of people can fit into the system for the purposes of contributing results that serve the whole.Â
One of the challenges of reading this book is reconciling the core principles that Drucker espouses with the huge changes that have taken place since the book was first written (the late 60s). Part of that difference has to do with the role of the individual in relation to the organization. I'm trying to reconcile in my mind some of the organizational habits of today's startup culture (that are supposedly changing everything about leadership and org structure) with some of Drucker's core and indisputable principles.Â
For example, one of the major ways in which organizations have had to change in recent decades, involves motivations and incentives. Unless I'm mistaken, Drucker was one of the architects of the practice known as "stack ranking," which has been criticized for killing creativity and creating a culture of fear and competition, rather than transparency, trust, and collaboration (which are sacred in the startup culture). Stack ranking pitted colleagues against one another in an effort to motivate them to produce more. I wonder what he would think of Microsoft's recent change to its policy?
Another example, brought about more by the changing economy than technology, is about how to adapt to a new job market. In some industries (notably in media and journalism) there are much fewer opportunities in large organizations, and a great many more opportunities for self-starters or for growing small organizations. With that in mind, Drucker's advice for hiring can be tweaked. He writes that an executive should focus on what a man can do, rather than what the job requires. That certainly holds true today, but the advice is also suitable for individuals who are seeking employment - more so now than before, the unemployed person may help themselves by showing what they can do, rather than applying to a zillion jobs, or pretending to mould their personality to fit a job description that, in reality, doesn't entirely work for them.Â
While the recipe for bringing scale and effectiveness to organizations that grow has not fundamentally changed, I am nagged by the way Drucker writes about the individual:
"Only executive effectiveness can enable society to harmonize its two needs: the needs of organization to obtain from the individual the contribution it needs, and the need of the individual to have organization serve as his tool for accomplishment of his purposes."
What I end up with is a sense that for Drucker, the individual must be viewed in relation to his or her capacity to contribute, to produce, in a knowledge economy. It reveals a very meritocratic anthropology. Today, behavioral science has led some organizations to focus on the behaviors and patterns that yield results, not the results themselves. That is the better way to ensure long-run success for the organization and the individual.
The question is, can an individual  be completely fulfilled by contributing to an organization. Is a society limited to these two needs?
I want to be the the last person to downplay the role that "contributing to an organization" can have in an individual's sense of fulfillment. However, there is almost certainly more to life, and therefore, more to a harmonious society, than individual contribution and organizational effectiveness.Â
We do know that Drucker has room for a more dynamic view of the individual, but it was only later in his life that he wrote this about nonprofit organizations:
“The "non-profit" institution neither supplies goods or services not controls. Its "product" is neither a pair of shoes nor an effective regulation. Its product is a changed human being. The non-profit institutions are human-change agents. Their "product" is a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether.”
We even get a hint in this book that Drucker doesn't think effective organizations are a panacea for harmonious society, or some exhaustive recipe for an effective utopia. He is, at the end of the day, trying to codify the practices that can make every-day common people more effective.Â
"The needs of large-scale organization have to be satisfied by common people achieving uncommon performance. This is what the effective executive has to make himself able to do. Though this goal is a modest one, one that everyone should be able to reach if he works at it, the self-development of an effective executive is a true development of the person."Â
To the extent that the aim is to do the best we can, these principles are indispensable.Â
