This image⁽⁽¹⁾⁾ came to me via a photographer friend of my wife. This is clever in a charming way to think of social media though I definitely part company with the description of Google +.

I found this graphic from Social Strand Media that does a better job of describing a wider range of social media.

Once you get beyond the simplicity of the presentation and get over the simplifications, or, in some cases, errors in characterization of social media, these reveal an interesting opportunity to shape a strategy that is particular to your business. Keep in mind that the social media sites mentioned here are really just the tip of a vast universe of niche specialty social media sites. If you are a winery, there are social media sites where oenophiles hang out. Does your business involve native species of perennial flowers in the upper midwest? There are social websites for virtually every slice of interests. If you can’t find one that suits you, start one yourself. Open source social website software like BuddyPress is simple to set up. Web marketing is not necessarily big budget, just long on thinking and involvement.

So, the web marketing challenge here is to identify your customer base(s) and get involved with them. Keep in mind you need to drop the old pushy sales and marketing approaches and get engaged to share your knowledge and enthusiasms. Web marketing is engagement and sharing not pushing messages. Sales will follow.

1. Turns out that this image has “gone viral” on the Web. Nevertheless, its source is in fact a Web marketing firm, Three Ships Media. The story of how and why they created this social media chart is here

In earlier posts in this series on Peter Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done, we reviewed his list of basic practices:

Effective managers:

1. “….know where their time goes.” 
2. “….focus on outward contribution”
3. “….build on strengths….” 
4. “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
5. “…. make effective decisions.”

This posting is devoted to the fourth practice, concentrate where it counts.⁽⁽¹⁾⁾ 

If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.⁽⁽²⁾⁾

By “first things first” Drucker means the real contributions that a manager can make. These are always found looking upward and outside of the organization to customers, markets, and other external factors. By concentrating on these the manager can direct the human resources of the organization to opportunities that are significant, where the results will be large. This focus requires self-discipline and an aggressive readiness to say “NO” to distractions.

The very act of attending to large opportunities causes the effective manager to concentrate the strengths of his human resources on the tasks required to achieve superior results. So, the manager concentrates personally on the opportunity and concentrate their human resources on the opportunity. Because people do pay attention to what the boss does, this act of personal concentration on a significant opportunity concentrates the organization’s focus. This is a virtuous self-perpetuating loop of attentiveness. Drucker goes on:

The first rule for concentration of executive efforts is to slough off the past that has ceased to be productive. Effective executives periodically review their work programs – and those of their associates – and ask: “If we did not already do this, would we go into it now?” And unless the answer is an unconditional “Yes”, they drop the activity or curtail it sharply…..those first-class  resources, especially those scarce resources of human strength which are engaged in those tasks of yesterday, are immediately pulled out and put to work on the opportunities of tomorrow.

In my experience, some companies put in place “end of life” policies for products and services. Quite literally the life cycle is defined explicitly. This forces out the old and requires the new.

Drucker points out the difficulties of setting priorities and sticking to them. First among these is making the decision about what not to do and then persisting in these decisions. There are enormous pressures to keep on doing what is, and has been, done. These are the pressures of history, of keeping on operating. Only the manager can make these choices and shift the focus of scarce human resources to the future.

Drucker summarizes:

Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities:

• Pick the future against the past;
• Focus on opportunity rather than on problem;
• Choose your own direction – rather than climb on the bandwagon; and
• Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something this is “safe” and easy to do.

…….The effective executive does not, in other words, truly commit himself beyond the one task he concentrates on right now. Then he reviews the situation and picks the next one task that now comes first.

 

Concentration – that is, the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first – is the executive’s only hope of becoming the master of time and events instead of their whipping boy.

 

1. All quotes in this posting come from pages 100-112 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006.
2. Note that decades before the controversies over so-called “multi-tasking” Drucker notes the singular importance that people can only effectively do one task at a time. I have written about this earlier in “Multitasking, Too Much Information, Interruptions, and High Performance” 

The lessons of the Beer Game are pretty evident. Delay in the supply chain causes amplified downstream problems. The problem wasn’t that we were kids running beer supply, the problem was the structure of the chain itself. Small changes at the front end lead to massive mistakes down the line.

And,

Because of the bullwhip effect illustrated by the game, Apple needs to have factories in China because the supply chain is there. We learned in the Beer Game that minute changes have massive ripple effects along the supply chain.

The U.S. has lost that industrial base and it’s extremely difficult to get it back. It’s not about unions, jobs Americans don’t want – it’s about delay.

These are not the lessons of the Beer Game.

The Bullwhip Effect (borrowed from Wikipedia)

The Beer Game is about knowledge within the supply chain, specifically visibility to finished goods demand, and more generally communication throughout the supply chain. There are many examples of supply chains that are tied right back to the cash registers so that suppliers see customer demand in real time. Though geography is not unimportant, mere physical proximity does not an effective, responsive supply chain make. After all, the Beer Game participants are sitting within eye sight of each other. This does not prevent chaos from predictably occurring. Predictably, because this supply chain simulation shows how the bullwhip effect operates, quite immutably, in the presence of miscommunication.

Labor Costs Drive Supply Chain Location

Mr. Wu does not seem to understand that labor costs drive the relocation of manufacturing and services to low wage countries. Even now, China itself is coming under pressures from this rule as its labor costs have been rising. Manufacturers are now scrambling for lower labor costs in Vietnam, Malaysia, and elsewhere. Capitalism has always driven for lower labor costs.

Lets hope that Mr. Wu’s father takes him out to the woodshed for another round of the Beer Game supply chain simulation. Perhaps then we will see a corrective posting on his site.

Effective managers:

• “….know where their time goes.” 
• “….focus on outward contribution”
• “….build on strengths….” 
• “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
• “…. make effective decisions.”

This posting is devoted to the third practice, build on strengths.⁽⁽¹⁾⁾

The effective executive makes strength productive. He knows that one cannot build on weakness. To achieve results, one has to use all of the available strengths – the strengths of associates, the strengths of the superior, and one’s own strengths. These strengths are the true opportunities. To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.⁽⁽²⁾⁾

Enable Strengths and Make Weaknesses Inconsequential

A central purpose of organization is to structure work to enable the strengths of people and to make weaknesses inconsequential. Weaknesses are always present,, but to focus on them is to focus on what cannot be done. Focusing on strength leads to a focus on performance and results

The keys to building the organizational structure that enables, even demands, performance through the application of strengths are the following four rules.

1. Create doable jobs, not jobs that require super humans.

2. Make the jobs big and demanding.

3. Understand clearly what your personnel can do. This appraisal takes place well before any thought of a job.

4. Acknowledge that you have to put up with weaknesses.

Personnel decisions need to be based on the actual performance in current and earlier positions. Focus on results, not training, education, other personal attributes, focus on the results that the person has produced. This is by far the best indicator of future performance.

On the other hand the effective manager must move quickly to remove people who have proven not to produce the results required. “”To let such a man stay  on corrupts the others. It is grossly unfair to the whole organization. It is grossly unfair to his subordinates who are deprived by their superior’s inadequacy of opportunities for achievement and recognition.  Above all, it is senseless cruelty to the man himself. He knows that he is inadequate whether he admits it to himself or not.”

 Managing Your Boss

Make Yourself Effective

The centrality of the performance of the effective manager to the overall effectiveness of those around them is a proven organizational fact. “Effective executives lead from strength in their own work. They make productive what they can do.” The first question to ask is “What can I do?”. Evaluate the work that seems to come easily and which produces excellent results. Conversely, note that which is difficult and produces substandard results. What are your work styles, how do you learn and make decisions? Above all be sure to focus on your strengths and produce the highest quality results. Your reports will notice and emulate these qualities. Those who don’t will need further development and perhaps pruning from the organization.

Opportunities and Problems

Drucker closes his discussion of strengths with a riff on a theme that pops up throughout the book.

“In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.” Nowhere is this more important than in respect to people. The effective executive looks upon people including himself as an opportunity. He knows that only strength produces results. Weakness only produces headaches – and the absence of weakness produces nothing.

He knows, moreover, that the standard of any human groups is set by the performance of the leaders. And he, therefore, never allows leadership performance to be based on anything bu true strength.”

1. All quotes in this posting come from pages 71-99 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006.
2. Note again the dated language from 45 years ago
3. Drucker presages the famous 1988

   Gabarro, John J., and John P. Kotter. “Managing Your Boss”. Harvard Business School Publication Corp., November 1988. If you have not read this article, do so. I used to give out copies to my new reports.

This is the fourth in a series discussing the 1968 book by Peter Drucker, The Effective Executive: the definitive guide to getting the right things done. In this part we will focus on the third chapter, “What Can I Contribute?”

“The effective executive focuses on contribution. He looks up from his work and outward towards goals. He asks, “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.”⁽⁽¹⁾⁾ …..

“The man who focuses on efforts and who stresses his downward authority is a subordinate no matter how exalted his title and rank. But the man who focuses on contribution and who takes responsibility for results, no matter how junior, in in the most literal sense of the phrase, “top management”. He holds himself accountable for the performance of the whole.”

What Is Contribution?

Contribution refers to three areas critical to organizational success:

• results, most often measured in the form of dollars or sales and profits. Results are a sine qua non for every organization.⁽⁽²⁾⁾
• building values and sustaining them. This covers the purpose of the organization; the vision and excellence required to fulfill this purpose, and the ethical framework for the organization.
• building and developing people for tomorrow. The effective manager, in the very act of looking upward and outward towards goals to discover their contribution, raise the sights of others in the organization.⁽⁽³⁾⁾

The effective manager changes their performance by focusing on contribution. By turning attention to the performance of the whole (this is the upward and outward metaphor), they turn away from their narrow technical skills. This leads to thinking about customers, clients, partners, the real source of all results for an organization. When the effective manager focuses on their contribution they are paying attention to results, their results and the results required of others.

Contribution and People

Drucker argues that “the focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.”

The manager who takes responsibility for their own contribution can demand that their subordinates do likewise. This leads to conversations about what contributions subordinates should be held accountable for. How might their special skills best be utilized. This this focus on contribution⁽⁽⁴⁾⁾ makes the whole relationship about these outcomes not about peripheral matters like how well liked they may or may not be and other “political” variables. With this focus on contribution communication becomes easier because it is about contributions (results) for the whole organization, not personalities.

Another benefit of this focus on contribution is that it enables communication throughout the organization. “The question, ‘Who has to use my output for it to become effective?’ immediately shows up the importance of people who are not in line of authority, either upward or downward, from and to the individual executive.”

A focus on contribution helps the effective manager to understand and map the most useful path to self-development. And the manager who focuses on their own self-development stimulates others to develop themselves.

The Effective Manager in Transition

A promotion or change in company is an event celebrated at the outset but fraught with dangers. The effective manager knows that by focusing on the new contriutions demanded in their new position they can avoid simply continuing to do what they have done before. Focusing on the new situation from the perspective of what contributions they can make provides a platform to examine the personal development, skills and experience from a fresh perspective. This is the only perspective that assures future success, what are the contributions I need to make and what skills do I need to learn or accentuate to be successful.

The concluding four paragraphs of Drucker’s third chapter are worth quoting whole.

The focus on contribution counteracts one of the basic problems of the executive: the confusion and chaos of events and their failure to indicate by themselves which is meaningful and which is merely “noise”. The focus on contribution imposes an organizing principle. It imposes relevance on events.

Focusing on contribution turns one of the inherent weaknesses of the executive’s situation – his dependence on other people, his being within an organization – into a source of strength. It creates a team.

Finally, focusing on contribution fights the temptation to stay within the organization. It leads the executive – especially the top-level man – to lift his eyes from the inside of efforts, work, and relationships, to the outside; that is, to the results of the organization. It makes him try hard to have direct contact with the outside – whether markets and customers, patients in a community, or the various “publics” which are outside a government agency.

To focus on contribution is to focus on effectiveness.

1. all quotes in this posting come from pages 52 – 70 in Peter Drucker The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. Revised. Collins Business, 2006.
2. It may be measured differently, for example, in a health care organization as patient outcomes.
3. in the last two decades, this insight has evolved into formal human development programs throughout high performance organizations. This takes the form of mentoring, multi-skilling the workforce, encouraging and supporting external education and more.
4. note that by using “contribution” we are not narrowing the range to only financial results but include the other two, values and people.

In the previous posting in this series we closed with Drucker’s five essential practices for managers.

Effective managers:

1. know where their time goes.
2. focus on outward contribution.
3. build on strengths….
4. concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.
5. make effective decisions.

This posting focuses on the first of these, time.

Time is a central resource, yet unlike other resources it cannot be inventoried, purchased, or controlled in any way. It is always the scarcest resource. Thus the use of our time and the organization’s time is critical to achieving results.

Effectiveness Depends on Continuous, Uninterrupted Blocks of Time

“Time in large, continuous, and uninterrupted units is needed….”⁽⁽¹⁾⁾ A manager who can only find brief moments for reflective thought is bound to think about only what is at hand, what they already know, and what they have already done.

Drucker argues that there is a three step process that is the foundation of effectiveness in managing time. First is recording the use of time, second is managing time,⁽⁽²⁾⁾ and third is the consolidation of discretionary time. These are the steps to coming to grips with how one’s time is being used now.

Reducing Time Wasters

Lets turn immediately to the second step, managing time. Drucker posits three ways to reduce wasted time immediately. First, look for activities and tasks that do not need to be done at all. What would happen if they simply remained undone, unattended? Would anyone miss them? Second, which of the tasks on your time log could be done or better should be done by someone else? How many times do you undertake a task that really could be handled much more competently by someone else? Third, look about for all of the time of other’s that you waste. Ask those who work for you, “What is it about how I work that causes you needless work?

Additional sources of time wasting come from (a) poor business systems (processes), (b) over staffing, (c) excess meetings, and (d) information – the wrong information or information in the wrong form.

The most common symptom of poor business processes is a chronic state of emergency, the recurring crisis. Recurring crises are a symptom of out of control practices. The first occurrence is the signal to examine what needs to be changed to prevent the second occurrence.

Over staffing may seem like an unlikely source of waste in today’s organizations. However, if people are figuratively bumping into each other, spending time negotiating the interpersonal politics, worried about turf battles, there is probably over staffing present.

“Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization.” Unless meetings are explicitly organized around sound principles they are almost invariably a waste of time. I have written quite a bit about this topic earlier, for example:  “Meetings – First – Don’t Have Them” and “Meetings – where you begin to be a more effective manager”.

Consolidating “Discretionary Time”

Though Drucker refers to these “large, continuous, and uninterrupted units” of time as “discretionary”. He clearly states that this is the time during which the effective manager gets real work done, the work that is their contribution to the results of the organization. There are a number of ways to schedule the important blocks of time. These days it is easier than ever to work from your home office. Or, schedule your operational meetings all on the same day and set aside another day for your “discretionary” time. A key element in whatever solution you come up with is to understand that these blocks of time must be uninterrupted and continuous. Not only do you have to discipline your staff, but, more difficult perhaps, you have to discipline yourself to turn off cellphones, email, IM, and all the other electronic interrupters that you are so addicted to.

Research that is more recent than available to Drucker  suggests that these discretionary blocks of time can be shorter than he envisions. In Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal 1991 book Flow,⁽⁽³⁾⁾  it is observed that periods of intense engagement and productivity are generally not sustainable for more than a few hours at a time. This strongly suggests that managers should seek to carve out a number of briefer blocks of time instead of struggling to create half or full day blocks.

In my business coaching work I have come to an approach significantly different from that of Drucker. The best strategy for building these blocks of time to focus on the really important, managers can benefit by just seizing the time and skipping the initial time logging work. Too many managers spend too much time gathering this data or allowing the data gathering to be a stumbling block to their effectiveness. I have written about this in earlier writing, “Seizing Your Time – the first step in time management”

1. all quotes are from Chapter Two – Know Thy Time in Drucker’s The Effective Executive
2. the use of the word “managing” here refers to the setting of priorities and making choices about the use of time. There is no sense to thinking that time is managed in the way every other resource in the organization can be managed.
3. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper Perennial, 1991.

Regardless of the to-do list technology employed, I am sure that your to-do list is almost always longer than can be fulfilled and increasingly filled with “overdue” tasks. Mine is chronically creeping in that direction.

A recent article on Brain Pickings (BrainPickins.org) “A Brief History of the To-Do List and the Psychology of Its Success” by Maria Popova reviewed some recent research ⁽⁽¹⁾⁾ ) that touches on two useful points.

First, our brains are hard-wired to worry and nag about  things undone. They keep popping up. Psychologists call this the Zeigarnik effect. This posits that the nagging is the brain’s method for getting things done. 

“[It] turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan. The unconscious mind apparently can’t do this on its own, so it nags the conscious mind to make a plan with specifics like time, place, and opportunity. Once the plan is formed, the unconscious can stop nagging the conscious mind with reminders.”

This suggests that a central purpose of a to-do list is to stop the nagging, not to get things done. My own experience regularly suggests that this is true.  When I review my to-do list and discover items long overdue and long forgotten, I sometimes marvel at how my mind has not been nagging me about these unaccomplished tasks.

So lets turn to the second point discussed in the Brain Picking’s article, prioritization.

“Tierney and Baumeister recount a revealing experiment: When a psychologist was invited to give a talk at the Pentagon on managing time and resources, he decided to warm up the elite group of generals with a short writing exercise. He asked them all to write a summary of their strategic approach limited to 25 words.

The exercise stumped most of them. None of the distinguished men in uniform could come up with anything.The only general who managed a response was the lone woman in the room. She had already had a distinguished career, having worked her way up through the ranks and been wounded in combat in Iraq. Her summary of her approach was as follows: ‘First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.’”

Here is the nub of the to-do list problem: the limited capacity we have for focus and the strain between the tactical and the strategic. Despite our age’s blathering about “multi-tasking” (see my earlier post on this topic) the human brain is really only able to effectively and efficiently perform one task at a time.

I was gratified to see the general’s response because it has been my regularly repeated mantra that if your strategy has more than two or three tasks in front of you and your organization at one moment, make choices and drop the others.

Well, this is nice in theory, but how do you account for the blizzard of little tasks that consume so much of our days? Here is where effective managers apply a range of practices to reduce the number of tasks caused by out of control processes, improve delegation and authority for others (see “Step 1 – Stop Answering Questions” in this earlier article), and seize blocks of time to work on the future.

Finally, all of this supports the wisdom of David Allen’s book Getting Things Done: the art of stress-free productivity. His “mind-sweep” is a step that I repeat regularly to get stuff out of my head where the brain’s nagging machinery chugs along so relentlessly. And he has wonderful Trash and Someday/Maybe  buckets that help get rid of tasks that will never or almost never be done.

1. mostly focused on a chapter about to-do lists, the third chapter, titled “A Brief History of the To-Do List, From God to Drew Carey,” in Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength by John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister

This phrase, now seemingly completely worn out in the ever newer world of Web 2.0 going on Web X.0, is really still true. Now, in the world of increasingly flashy Web production values, it is time to resurrect this slogan and put it into action in your business. This is especially important for small business people who cannot afford the “finer things” on the Web. Time to take a look again at your value to your customer niche and bring back content, real, genuine, authentic in all its quirkiness, your content.

Here is an example of a young woman, Jessica Beinecke,  teaching idiomatic English to learners of English in China. She is now reaching millions of people. And, she is doing this with no other production equipment than a laptop computer and some lights.

Why is she so successful? Watch.

‘OMG!’ Exports American Slang to China – from The News Hour – Friday 02/10/2012

and here is her lesson for Valentine’s Day.

How many times have I asked clients, “Do you have insurance on your business assets? Do you have liability insurance? Key person insurance?” For many small business people these questions are a combination of absurd and uncomfortable. Frequently I am brushed off with, “I can’t afford that.”

Can You Afford This?

I received a phone call from a client yesterday that was a startling and real example that bad things do happen. This client started a personal services business in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan two years ago. Her progress has been very good. She started taking home a paycheck within the first year of operations. The business was demanding but she was definitely on the winning end.

Then, a phone call in the middle of the night from a friend, “Your building is burning.” By the time she got to the street the four story reinforced concrete structure was, as the evening news reports, “fully involved”. By day break everything was gone. All of the lease hold improvements, all of the equipment, everything.

My client rushed about over the next days to move as much of her services to spaces in a church basement and a local school to keep her major clients engaged and served.

Meanwhile, she turned to her insurance agent and began the process of documenting her losses. Yes, she had taken out insurance from the very beginning and was current on her bills. With not just a little work on her part, she can look forward to substantially recovering the financial investments and, because she had a business continuation clause, she will be able to receive some of her income over the next six months.

Without this insurance coverage, it is clear to her that she would very likely have to walk away from two years of work. She is now faced with very significant challenges. But, the financial equation is buoyed by her wise decision to carry insurance.

• They asked, “What needs to be done?”
• They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?”
• They developed action plans.
• They took responsibility for decisions
• They took responsibility for communicating
• They focused on opportunities rather than problems.
• They ran productive meetings.
• They thought and said “we” rather than “I”.

But, before really getting to work on these he takes on some very interesting foundational issues. First, “… the executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply that he is expected to be effective.”⁽⁽¹⁾⁾  

What is effectiveness?

Effectiveness is not dependent on brilliance, creativity, imagination or knowledge. “These are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.”   Drucker distinguishes the world of manual work from what he calls knowledge work. Manual work is a about doing things correctly and with efficiency. Knowledge work is about doing the right things. “Increasingly, the majority of people who have been schooled to use knowledge, theory, and concept rather than physical force or manual skill work in an organization and are effective insofar as they can make a contribution to the organization.”  ((Certainly the 45 years since he wrote this has changed much knowledge work into quite tightly routinized processes, I think that his point still stands. )) But, what is the scope of the effective manager, who is a manager. The answer is that everyone who supervises people, deploys physical assets (machinery, computing, etc.), is responsible for a budget of sales (including internal services between departments or divisions) and expense, and is responsible for results, either in dollars of sales or some service metric, is a manager. Broadly then, for The purposes of the discussion, everyone from CEO to front line supervisor is a manager.

What Is The World of the Manager? 

Drucker says that there are four major realities within which every manager inescapably live.

1. “The manager’s time tends to belong to everyone else.”
2. “Managers are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work.”
3. “The third reality pushing the manager toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization.”
4. “Finally, the executive is within an organization.”

The first reality will be discussed in the next posting in this series. The second reality points to the overwhelming tendency of managers to continue doing the work of the operations which they manage. Engineering managers continue to engineer; Sales managers go on selling; CFOs spend too much time with the bookkeeping and financial management tools of their bailiwicks. The problem here is that this engagement tends to determine what the manager focuses on and what gets the bulk of their time. “What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though then criteria are not found in the flow of events.”

The third reality points out that the manager is only effective to the extent that they can communicate and organize those in the organization to work on what is important in a coherent and vigorous manner. And, Drucker adds, the effective manager must reach outside of his organization to others not reporting to him, horizontally and vertically,to enable them to support his vision and contributions.

The fourth reality is perhaps the most significant. “All results are on the outside. The only business results, for instance, are produced by a customer….”⁽⁽²⁾⁾  Inside the organization are the costs and efforts, outside is where those are converted into sales and profits by customers. “This outside, this environment which is the true reality, is well beyond effective control from the inside.” So a primary task then for every manager is to be actively seeking out these external realities, the changes in trends and technologies, that control much about their effectiveness. 

These four realities apply across the whole span of the managerial world. These obviously apply to the corporate chieftains. But, they apply equally to the front line supervisor. The work output of their team, group, or department is converted into upstream value by the organizations they support. The real value of their work is determined by these organizations not by anyone’s within their team. The reports of output may look good, but, if the environment of them consuming organization changes, and you are not paying attention to their needs, your real results will not be meeting their needs.

Can Effectiveness Be Learned?

Drucker argues:

“Effectiveness…. is a habit; that is a complex of practices. And practices can always be learned. Practices are simple, deceptively so; even a seven-year-old has no difficulty in understanding a practice. But practices are always exceedingly hard to do well. They have to be acquired…… that is repeated ad nauseam until…. [they] become unthinking, conditioned reflex, and firmly ingrained habit. Practices one learns by practicing and practicing and practicing again.”

The Five Essential Practices of the Effective Manager

Effective managers:

1. “….know where their time goes.”
2. “….focus on outward contribution.”
3. “….build on strengths….”
4. “….concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.”
5. “…. make effective decisions.”

We will take up each of these practices in future postings in this series.

1. All quotations in this posting are from pp. 1-24. Here is an early example of how the style, and many of the examples, in The Effective Executive are quite dated. The pronoun “she” never appears in the book. When he wrote the book in 1967, women in management were extraordinarily rare and their was only a nascent awareness that women could and should play a full role in our economic and social institutions
2. Notice that long before the customer value centered world that became commonplace in the 1990s and continues today, Drucker stated clearly that all value is defined and arises outside the organization