The Effective Executive

What is needed are few, but fundamental, decisions. What is needed is the right strategy rather than razzle-dazzle tactics.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Second, the most effective consultant depends on people within the client organization to get anything done. Their effectiveness therefore determines in the last analysis whether a consultant contributes and achieves results, or whether he is pure “cost center” or at best a court jester.

This means that he is effective only if and when other people make use of what he contributes. Organization is a means of multiplying the strength of an individual. It takes his knowledge and uses it as the resource, the motivation, and the vision of other knowledge workers.

This means that he has to set aside time to direct his vision from his work to results, and from his specialty to the outside in which alone performance lies.

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.

Effective executives differ widely in their personalities, strengths, weaknesses, values, and beliefs. All they have in common is that they get the right things done. Some are born effective. But the demand is much too great to be satisfied by extraordinary talent. Effectiveness is a discipline. And, like every discipline, effectiveness can be lear

executive to the exclusion of his real tasks and his real effectiveness in the outside.

2. Effective executives focus on outward contribution. They gear their efforts to results rather than to work. They start out with the question, “What results are expected of me?”

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.”