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

In other words, up to recent times, the major problem of organization was efficiency in the performance of the manual worker who did what he had been told to do. Knowledge workers were not predominant in organization.

the knowledge worker, the man who puts to work what he has between his ears rather than the brawn of his muscles or the skill of his hands.

1. Effective executives know where their time goes.

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.

Effectiveness, in other words, 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, as we all learn the multiplication table; that is,

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time.

3. A common cause of time-waste is largely under the executive’s control and can be eliminated by him. That is the time of others he himself wastes.

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

The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive. Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does.