The Effective Executive Part 3
Effective executives lead from strength in their own work. If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
By Calvin Wilson on Jan 21, 2012 with Comments 0. Filed under Management.
In the Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals series about Peter Drucker’s must read business manual, 
The Effective Executive, we have already learned about the mix between intelligence and character – about vision, now in part 3, we learn about the hard and soft skill-sets that a really good manager will need to be successful.
1. Effective executives lead from strength in their own work.
2. If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
3. A great deal could be said about the analysis of priorities; courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities; pick the future against the past, focus on opportunity rather than on the problem, choose your own direction-rather than climb on the bandwagon, and aim high, aim for something hat will make a difference rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do.
4. Effective executives do not make a great many decisions. They concentrate on the important ones. They try to think through what is strategic and generic, rather than “solve problems.”
5. The elements of the decision process; the clear realization that the problem was generic and could be solved through a decision which established a rule, a principle; the definition of the specifications which the answer to the problem had to satisfy, the boundary of conditions, the thinking through of what is right, the solution that will fully satisfy the specifications before attention is given to the compromises, adaptations, and concessions needed to make the decision acceptable, the building into the decision to carry it out, and the feedback which tests the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the actual course of events.
6. The effective decision maker, therefore always assumes initially that the problem is generic; and if the event is truly unique, the experienced decision maker suspects that this heralds a new underlying problem and that what appears as unique will turn out to have been simply the first manifestation of a new generic situation.
7. The decision process has to have clear specification as to what the decision has to accomplish.
8. One has to start out with what is right rather than what is acceptable precisely because one always has to compromise in the end.
Good luck.
Calvin Wilson
Founder and CEO
Upstart: Business and Management for 20-40 Year Old Professionals
calvin.wilson1@verizon.net
http://twitter.com/Upstart__Nation
Filed Under: Management
