Yes, but read it selectively. Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive is almost sixty years old, it was written for managers inside large organisations, and a good deal of what it says about how people work rests on his own experience with no study behind it. Two parts still hold up for the owner of a small firm, the chapter on where your time goes and the two chapters on decisions. Read those with a pen, skim the rest on a first pass, and pair it with Andy Grove for the practical detail.
This is the fifth book in our review series, after The Goal, The E-Myth Revisited, High Output Management and Deep Work. Gerber wrote for the owner still doing the work. Drucker wrote for someone higher up a much bigger organisation.
What the book is
The Effective Executive was first published by Harper & Row in 1967. The edition most readers will pick up is the HarperBusiness Essentials paperback, 208 pages, first issued in that form in January 2006. HarperBusiness reissued it in hardcover in January 2017 with a new foreword and afterword, and the chapters are the same seven.
The main text is short, seven chapters and a conclusion. There is one trap before chapter 1. Modern editions open with a 2004 Harvard Business Review essay, written when Drucker was in his nineties, which counts eight practices. The 1967 book itself has five, and summaries often mix the two lists.
Drucker was born in Vienna in 1909 and died in 2005, a few days short of his 96th birthday. He taught management at New York University for about two decades and then at Claremont from 1971. He was in his late fifties when this book came out.
Who Drucker means by an executive
The word in the title puts owners off, and it should not. Drucker's definition has nothing to do with title. An executive is anyone who "is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results."
By that test, in a firm of eight people the owner is an executive, and so is anyone else whose decisions change what the firm delivers. In most firms of three to twenty people that means the owner and a small handful of others.
He opens the first chapter with one line: "To be effective is the job of the executive." The rest of the chapter argues that effectiveness can be learned, which is why its title is "Effectiveness Can Be Learned". He supports that hopeful claim mostly from acquaintance, and we come back to that weakness below.
Five practices, and the two that matter to an owner
The book is built on five practices: know where your time goes, ask what you can contribute, build on strengths, put first things first, and make effective decisions. Each practice gets its own chapter, and decisions get two.
For an owner the five are not equal. Building on strengths is sound advice for someone with a department to staff, and a small firm has fewer strengths to arrange. The time chapter and the decision chapters change what you do on Monday, and they are the two we would mark.
Exhibit 1
The time practice and the decision practice change an owner's week more than the rest of Drucker's list
Know where your time goes
Drucker's first practical instruction is to write down where the time actually goes before trying to manage it. He claims the week people remember is not the week they spent, and that only a record shows the difference. He presents that as experience and attaches no figure to it, so neither do we.
The first chapter states the problem well. "The executive's time tends to belong to everybody else." A little further on he puts it more bluntly: "Everybody can move in on his time, and everybody does."
The one piece of research Drucker cites on how executives spend their time is Sune Carlson's 1951 study Executive Behavior, which recorded senior executives' time use in large companies. Drucker's summary of it is that even the most effective executives found "most of their time taken up with the demands of others." That is his reading of a 1951 study of large-company executives. Carlson did not study owners, and an owner's week is if anything more exposed, because the customer, the staff and the supplier all have the same phone number.
The practical lesson survives the thin evidence. Keep the log first, and decide what to change after you have read it.
What only the owner can contribute
The third chapter is called "What Can I Contribute?", and its question is about results instead of effort. For an owner, the sharpest version asks what the firm needs from you that nobody else in it can do. Our posts on a 30-minute weekly review and a steadier week ask the same question in smaller pieces. Drucker asks it harder.
Put the answer next to the time log and the gap is usually plain. On one side sit the few things only the owner can supply, such as the decisions about which work to take, the relationships with the largest clients and the standard the work is held to. On the other sits the week as recorded, much of it the work of someone the firm has not hired or trained yet.
Exhibit 2
The owner's week should be built around the few contributions nobody else can make, and the time log shows what is crowding them out
Here the book and a small firm part company a little. Drucker assumes that once you have seen the gap you can hand the other work to a subordinate. In a very small firm there may be nobody to hand it to, and sometimes the honest reading of the log is that the owner does the work because no one else can yet. That is a hiring or training problem, and Gerber is better on it.
First things first
The chapter on priorities is called "First Things First", and it argues that second-tier items should be dropped for good. To Drucker, concentration means dropping things. A list that only gets reordered each week never gets shorter.
An owner will find this the hardest chapter to act on, because every item on the list belongs to someone who expects it. The weekly review is where you do the dropping, one item at a time.
Decisions, which get two chapters
Drucker gives decisions two chapters, more than any other practice, and they are the best part of the book. One of his terms is "boundary conditions", meaning what the decision has to achieve, spelled out before choosing. Most small-firm decisions skip that step. The owner picks between two options without first writing down what either one has to do.
His other insistence, in paraphrase, is that a decision is not made until someone is responsible for carrying it out, and that the result is checked against what was expected. We would put it more plainly for a small firm. A decision that never became somebody's action, with a date on it, is an intention, and a firm can collect intentions for years.
Exhibit 3
A decision is finished only when it has a named person, a date and a later check against what it was meant to achieve
The same year the book appeared, a Harvard Business Review article carried the short form of the argument. In January 1967 he wrote: "Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on what is important." For an owner who makes small calls all day long, that is uncomfortable to read, and correct.
Where the book fits badly
The world of the book is a large organisation in the 1960s. The examples are 1960s institutions: the Ford Edsel, thalidomide, the Bell System, the Cuban missile crisis. Every executive in the book is "he", and most of them have a boss and subordinates. You will spend some effort translating a chapter about a division head into a morning at a small firm.
The bigger problem is evidence. Much of the book is Drucker reporting what he saw in "the effective executives I have known and worked with". It is experience, stated with confidence and rarely backed by a study. When a Yale researcher, Chris Argyris, listed ten traits of successful executives, Drucker's answer was that he knew "quite a few" people with those traits who were "singularly ineffectual." That is a fair point and a thin rebuttal at once. Treat the book's claims about how people work as a sharp consultant's observations, and test them against your own log.
One more caution. The line most often quoted from this book, the neat pairing of efficiency and effectiveness, is not in it in that form. The book's own version is plainer: for manual work "we need only efficiency; that is, the ability to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things done." The tidy version appears in Drucker's later book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, according to the quotation researchers at Quote Investigator. Drucker did not invent the contrast either. A Pennsylvania newspaper printed the same idea in 1869.
Read it if, skip it if
Read it if you are the owner, or one of the few people whose calls shape what the firm delivers, and your week feels as though it belongs to everyone else. Read the time chapter and both decision chapters closely, and keep a time log while you do.
Skip it, or skim it, if you want the mechanics of running people, such as one-to-ones, meetings and measuring output. Grove covers that far better and far more concretely, and the two books work well as a pair, Drucker for what to attend to and Grove for how. Skip it too if you already keep a time log and write every decision down with a name and a date. You have taken most of what it offers.
Our management consulting work usually starts where the book does, with a record of the owner's week and a list of the decisions nobody has yet turned into anyone's job.