Coming at you this week with a few thoughts from Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive.
As this is my second or third most highlighted book, I've whittled down these down to just over a dozen with some effort. No promises that this will be the last time I bring you wisdom from Mr. Drucker. Let’s get into it.
1. “Only three things happen naturally in organizations: Friction, Confusion, and Underperformance. Everything else requires leadership.”
This happens when leaders stop showing up, providing clarity, care, competence, and acting with conviction. Now let’s talk about some things to avoid devolving into balls of friction, confusion, and suck.
2. “The crucial question is not how can I achieve but how can I contribute.”
Regardless of where you are, came from, or your struggles, you can give more to the world, and your team, than you take.
Also, leaders have a choice. They can create environments where ‘team’ is a verb or one where we try to elbow each other in the face. We do that with our actions, compensation structures, and the behavior we tolerate/reward.
3. “Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.”
I have yet to find someone who says, “I’d like to be actively managed each day.” People want to be helped, supported, mentored, advised, coached, and led, but no one wants to be managed. Let’s be leaders, not managers.
4. “The purpose of organizations is to enable ordinary humans to do extraordinary things.”
If individuals could do what teams do, we wouldn’t need teams. A leader's job is to facilitate performance and help teams/people find their potential. Sometimes that’s as simple as getting out of their way.
5. “Our job in life is to make a positive difference, not prove we are right.”
This comes with the added benefit that you and everyone around you will be happier when you give up trying to prove you are right.
6. “The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence. It’s yesterday’s logic.”
When the stress comes, and the fog rolls in, clarity is everything. Slow down, ask the right questions, and seek help with the answers. Leaders must be decisive but can’t believe everything they think.
ProTip: As you get older, keep young people as advisors. They will see things you won’t.
7. “Listening, the first competency of leadership, is not a skill, it’s a discipline. All you have to do is keep your mouth shut.”
😶
8. “Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, it will not survive.”
Someone is building something right now to do what you do, but better. Whether you want to believe it or not, that’s the truth. You can sit in your warm hut making s’mores, but at some point, the marshmallows burn, you’ll run out of graham crackers, and the wolves kick in the door and eat you. Or, you can step out into the storm and face reality.
The only way to survive is to keep moving, foraging for ideas, nourishing them, encouraging them, and reshaping your organization. As General Eric Shinseki said, “If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.”
9. “Without an action plan, the executive becomes a prisoner of events”
Living at the top of your inbox, reacting to what is happening, and cleaning up mess after mess is a sure way to make your way into the irrelevant-ville.
If you lead an organization and don’t spend 10-20% of your time on long-term thought and action, you should consider a change. Do you need to spend one full day a week planning? Maybe not, but if you are an executive and exclusively spend your days fighting fires instead of building the next-generation fire suppression system, you probably aren’t effective.
Drucker says, “We must not starve our biggest opportunities because we’re so busy throwing ourselves at our biggest problems and dwelling on past mistakes.”
10. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”
Slidedecks are one thing, but having that hard conversation, cutting that product, stopping that process, hiring that team, or taking that big risk is what matters. If it’s worth it, it’s going to be hard. Get to work and focus on what matters.
Drucker reminds us: “There are two types of people: Those that produce results and those that give reasons why they don’t.”
11. “If there is any one secret to effectiveness, it’s concentration. Effective executives do first things first and do them one at a time.”
Your work is hard, and your decisions are complex. Find the space and discipline to focus on one thing at a time. Multi-tasking is anti-effective.
12. “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently what shouldn’t be done”
We spend time keeping the ‘trains on the tracks’, but maybe we should let them come off the tracks. Perhaps the trains are on the wrong tracks. Maybe we shouldn’t have trains at all. It’s like when Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50M and they laughed.
Don’t be afraid to walk away from sunk costs, whether that’s sunk time, money, or emotions. You are only sinking more the longer you don’t make the hard decision. Everything great was built on courage.
13. “The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on.”
As you build your plan, don’t underestimate the inefficiencies created by overstaffing. Hire carefully, not only for culture but for effectiveness. Be careful that you don’t hire to compensate for incompetence because you might become 100% focused on internal problems and not even know the wolves are circling.
14. “To focus on weakness is not only foolish; it is irresponsible,”
Organizations are the sum of our strengths and weaknesses. Knowing where you add the most value will let you lean in, and you can mitigate or change where you are weak.
Teams exist because they do what individuals cannot do on their own. Drucker reminds us, “Strong people always have strong weaknesses, too…Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself - not only your strengths and weaknesses but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution. Because only when you operate from strengths can you achieve excellence.”
This is just a taste, and I recommend The Effective Executive to anyone who asks. If you’d like to see all my highlights, send me a note, and I’ll send them your way.
Here are the takeaways:
Know yourself: Embrace your incompetence and lean on your superpowers. After all, this is a team sport.
Teams Are How The Ordinary Do The Extraordinary: But be careful, without leadership, teams naturally devolve into “friction, confusion, and underperformance.”
Bigger Is Usually Not Better: Keep your team as small as possible to be effective. Get too big, and you spend all your time managing - and no one wants to be managed or manage.
Change or Die: Someone is trying to make you irrelevant and kill you. Don’t help them.
The Best Relentlessly Focus: Thoughtful prioritization, planning, and a relentless focus on execution is required. Don’t get distracted by your inbox. Make prioritization your priority.
Now go get it.
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Onward,
Only Three Things Happen Naturally In Organizations