Business book summaries in sixty seconds that busy professionals can consume in spare time between meetings, during the commute, or at the end of a day.
Maximizing the Strength of Employees from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Mediacast
Listen on Apple Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/executive-summary-by-product-ceo/id1519708164), Google Podcast (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMmY4NGVkOC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/3bToknu4Z5PQBWM3eAV6Xp), or Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrTVygBExdjc8xI50DGib1w).
Transcript
Organization is a means of multiplying the strength of an individual.
A lone entrepreneur who is good at finance but bad at marketing is likely to get in trouble.
A large business can easily make productive a man who has true strength in finance alone.
Average is a meaningless metric in personnel management. (For example, average lost time accidents per hundred employees).
Whoever tries to staff an organization to avoid weakness will end up at best with mediocrity.
The job that fails two people in succession, even though each had performed well in previous assignments, must be assumed unfit for human beings.
The job must be redesigned.
The executive must also bring the strength out of himself.
The effective executive asks himself, “What are the things that I seem to be able to do with relative ease, while they come rather hard to other people?”
1 Sept 2020
Executive Challenges and Making Decisions from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Mediacast
Listen on Apple Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/executive-summary-by-product-ceo/id1519708164), Google Podcast (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMmY4NGVkOC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/3bToknu4Z5PQBWM3eAV6Xp), or Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrTVygBExdjc8xI50DGib1w).
Transcript
No matter how individually talented, the executive is effective only if and when others in the organization make use of what he contributes.
It takes his knowledge and uses it as the resource, the motivation, and the vision of other knowledge workers.
Often, the executive needs to influence people over whom he has no direct control in order to deliver impact.
They are people in other areas, people who are sideways in the organization, or his superiors.
A decision making process consists of asking questions, forming hypotheses, and validating answers through experiments.
The effective executive encourages diverse opinions which become the hypotheses to test.
Unless alternatives have been explored, one has a closed mind.
Effective decision makers thus promote dissension and disagreement rather than consensus.
If everyone thinks an idea is a good idea, the group is likely suffering groupthink.
28 Jun 2020
Managing Time from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Mediacast
Listen on Apple Podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/executive-summary-by-product-ceo/id1519708164), Google Podcast (https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xMmY4NGVkOC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw==), Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/3bToknu4Z5PQBWM3eAV6Xp), or Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrTVygBExdjc8xI50DGib1w).
Transcript
An executive is a captive of his organization. Everyone can and will move in on his time.
If executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, he will flitter himself away “operating”.
Effective executives do not start with tasks. They start with time.
They do not start with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.
Then they attempt to cut back unproductive demands on their time.
Time is a unique resource. (On the contrary, money is actually quite plentiful.)
The effective executive asks his team members, without being afraid to hear the truth,
“What do I do that wastes your time?”
The effective executive focuses on contribution. There are always more important contributions to be made than there is time available to make them.
Every executive knows nothing ever goes right. The unexpected always happens. Effective executive allows a fair margin of time beyond what is actually needed.
Thus, the first step toward effectiveness is a procedure: record where the time goes, eliminate unnecessary time-wasters, then focus on contributions.
23 Jun 2020
Effective Meetings and Managing Boss from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Mediacast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrTVygBExdjc8xI50DGib1w
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3bToknu4Z5PQBWM3eAV6Xp
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/productceo (https://anchor.fm/productceo)
Transcript
The effective executive runs effective meetings.
At the outset of each meeting, state the purpose and contribution the meeting is to achieve.
At the end of each meeting, go back to the opening statement and relate the final conclusions to the original intent.
Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM, is one of the most effective executives Peter Drucker had ever known.
In meetings, Sloan never took notes. He rarely spoke, except to clarify a confusing point.
At the end, he summed up, thanked participants, and immediately sent out a summary of the discussion, conclusions, and follow up work.
For each work assignment, he specified the deadline and the directly responsible individual.
To be truly effective in an organization, the executive must not only manage subordinates, but also their boss.
If their boss is not promoted, they will be bottled up behind him.
If their boss is fired, the successor is usually brought in from the outside, and they bring their own bright young talents with them.
The effective executive accepts that their boss is human. Any human has strengths and limitations.
Thus, managing one’s boss is the same as managing one’s subordinates.
To make the boss effective, one must enable the boss to build on their strength, to do what they can do best.
22 Jun 2020
Effectiveness and Efficiency from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker
Mediacast
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrTVygBExdjc8xI50DGib1w
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3bToknu4Z5PQBWM3eAV6Xp
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/productceo
Transcript
Drucker has met many effective executives. They varied in personalities, but all followed the same eight practices:
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 communication.
They were focused on opportunities rather than problems.
They ran productive meetings.
They thought and said “we” rather than “I”.
For manual work, we need only efficiency. Efficiency is the ability to do things right.
For executive work, we need effectiveness. Effectiveness is the ability to get the right things done.
Effectiveness can be learned.
There are few things less desirable in business than rapidly producing the wrong product.
Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.
In knowledge work, individual contributors are asked to perform the executive work: make strategic decisions that impact the entire enterprise.
As an effective American infantry captain put it in words, “What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.”
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