Dr. Mario's 2nd 🧠

📖 The Effective Executive

5 min read

Why did I want to read it?

After writing ✍️ Déjame sin trabajo, por favor, even though I found peace with my job, I was wondering if the oldies think something different about management & leadership. So, I also got 📖 Calidad, productividad y competitividad. La salidad de la crisis from W. Edwards Deming.

What did I get out of it?

Effective executives:

  1. Manage their time.
  2. Focus on results.
  3. Focus on strengths.
  4. Focus on few key areas (prioritize well).
  5. Make few fundamental decisions.

Introduction

Only one task at a time, and after completing it, you reprioritize (p. xiii).

It may not be the employees fault that they are underperforming, but even so, they have to be removed.

People who have failed in a new job should be given the choice to go back to a job at their former level and salary. (p. xvii)

Effective executives are focused on opportunities more than on problems. (p. xviii)

Effectiveness can be learned

…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. While others rush around in the frenzy and busyness which very bright people so often confuse with “creativity.” the plodder puts one foot in front of the other and gets there first, like the tortoise in the old fable. (p. 1)

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by any of the yardsticks for manual work. The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself toward performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness. (p. 4)

Almost every knowledge worker is an executive:

I have called executives” those knowledge workers, managers, or individual professionals who are expected by virtue of their position or their knowledge to make decisions in the normal course of their work that have significant impact on the performance and results of the whole. (…) These decisions, moreover, are of the same kind as the decisions of top management. (…) The most subordinate manager, we now know, may do the same kind of work as the president of the company or the administrator of the government agency; that is, plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure. His compass may be quite limited, but within his sphere, he is an executive. (p. 8-9)

About time: the executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else and…

What events are important and relevant and what events are merely distractions the events themselves do not indicate. 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.” (p. 12)

On Generalist vs specialist:

What seems to be wanted is universal genius, and universal genius has always been in scarce supply. The experience of the human race indicates strongly that the only person in abundant supply is the universal incompetent. We will therefore have to staff our organizations with people who at best excel in one of these abilities. (p. 18)

Know thy time

Super sobering stat (from the University of Misco):

But even this disciplined man had to resign himself to having at least half his time taken up by things of minor importance and dubious value, things that nonetheless had to be done-the seeing of important customers who just “dropped in,” (p. 49)

I wasn’t so crazy when I time tracked myself! ✍️ Mi primera vez… como CTO. Luces, sombras, y algún claroscuro:

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. (…) This three-step process:

  • recording time,
  • managing time,
  • consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness. Effective executives know that time is the limiting factor. (p. 25)

Even very effective executives still do a great many unnecessary, unproductive things. But the best proof that the danger of overpruning is a bug. aboo is the extraordinary effectiveness so often attained by severely ill or severely handicapped people. (p. 40)

Time wasters

Process allergy

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. (p. 41)

Overstaffing

Specialists that may he 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. (p. 43)

Malorganization and malfunction in information

The opposite of 📖 Team Topologies.

Consolidating time

One highly effective man I know keeps two such lists one of the urgent and one of the unpleasant things that have to be done each with a deadline. When he finds his deadlines slipping, he knows his time is again getting away from him. (p. 51)

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