At the same time, you must address deficiencies that directly impede full flowering of your strength. It means that if you’re made to be a distance runner, don’t try to be a middle linebacker. Does Drucker’s “Build on strength” imperative mean never confronting our (or others’) deficiencies? Yes and no. “To focus on weakness is not only foolish it is irresponsible,” challenges Drucker.
The crucial question is now how to turn incompetence into excellence, but to ask, “What can a person do uncommonly well?” This leads, inevitably, to a conclusion: Your first responsibility is to determine your own distinctive competences – what you can do uncommonly well, what you are truly made for – and then navigate your life and career in direct alignment. One of Drucker’s most arresting points is that we are all incompetent at most things. “But one can always manage oneself.” How can you possibly expect others to perform at the highest levels without first experiencing that of yourself? Drucker lays out a law of organized performance: The ratio of a leader’s performance to those on his or her team remains constant therefore, if you want the average performance of those around you to go up, you must first improve your own performance. “That one can truly manage other people is by no means adequately proven,” Drucker writes. Here are ten lessons I learned from Peter Drucker and this book, and that I offer as a small portal of entry into the mind of the greatest management thinker of all time. Some of Drucker’s examples and language might be dated, but the insights are timeless and modern, as helpful today as when he wrote them more than five decades ago. Reading the text again, I’m reminded of how its lessons became deeply ingrained,Īlmost as a set of commandments. I first read The Effective Executive in my early thirties, and it was a huge inflection point in my own development. As Drucker states early in these pages: People endowed with tremendous brilliance are often “strikingly ineffectual.” And if that’s true for the exceptionally brilliant, what hope is there for the rest of us? Actually, there is something much better than hope: Drucker’s practical disciplines.
The most effective among us have the same number of hours as everyone else, yet they deploy them better, often much better than people with far greater raw talent. Anyone who has responsibility for getting the right things done – anyone who seeks how best to self-deploy on the few priorities that will make the biggest impact – is an executive. It doesn’t matter what size your organization is, or even whether you run an organization at all. IF YOU ARE to read one book on executive self-management, it should be this, Peter Drucker’s definitive classic, The Effective Executive. To the 50 th Anniversary Edition of The Effective Executive
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