The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Peter Drucker outlines wha makes an effective executive. Perhaps understanding and anticipating the role of “technocrats” as nominalized by Galbraith, Drucker notes that effective executives make effective decisions.
A huge portion of this, as Drucker outlines has to do with a few things.
1. understanding the material process a corporation is embedded in (the industry, its market)
2. understanding the needs of individuals working within a corporation
3. understanding the material organization a corporation has for placing individuals
All of this is to structure and effectively limit (yet empower) employees agency for the corporation.
In this manner, effective executives must be able to understand the maximal agency of their own situation, in order to make decisions. Drucker also sagely advises that such executives don’t make decisions lightly but still do so in a timely manner. All of this rests on the maximization of a corporation/departments ability to enact materially. To understand this, one must of course, understand the technical requirements of the corporation/position as lived by people on the ground. In this way Drucker is correct in anticipating a regime of individual whose job is to make decisions from theory rather than practice. In this way, Drucker explains the larger mode of executive apprati, seeing a need for the contemporary executive to “think outside the box” by welcoming greater opportunity to process information, take in points of view, and weight things according to process metrics.
He also correctly anticipates the role of computers in requiring people make decisions more often. You can read this as a self help manual for improving your executive role, in aligning yourself for the corporate world. Or you can conversely see this book as a calibration needed for executives to fit the modern international corporation milieu. Drucker may be a little dated in some ways, with his examples, but on principles, this is still how business is run today.
