The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials)

1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else.

Usually the people who are most important to the effectiveness of an executive are not people over whom he has direct control. They are people in other areas, people who in terms of organization, are “sideways.” Or they are his superiors. Unless the executive can reach these people, can make his contribution effective for them and in their work, he

A senior executive, we are told, should have extraordinary abilities as an analyst and as a decision-maker. He should be good at working with people and at understanding organization and power relations, be good at mathematics, and have artistic insights and creative imagination.

Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process: recording time, managing time, and consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness.

The knowledge worker must be focused on the results and performance goals of the entire organization to have any results and performance at all.

And the executive time scarcity is bound to become worse rather than better.

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.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside.

1. First one tries to identify and eliminate the things that need not be done at all, the things that are purely waste of time without any results whatever.