businessboomer…ahh!

Last night, I posted what was really a rant about my inability to keep on task and stick to a schedule. Tonight’s blog is an attempt to give you something with more substance, since I do appreciate that you’re here reading my random business bloggerings, and I think that you should get some sort of ROI for your time.

In January, I contacted the Peter F. Drucker Institute in Claremont, Calif., to learn how I could join the Drucker Society of Los Angeles. To my surprise, Drucker LA was founded only a few weeks before I contacted the institute. So, I met with the co-founders and quickly became the vice president of the society. To learn more about the society, check out the Drucker LA website (which I built thanks to a generous Web designer whose blog offers free customizable templates.)

Now, it’s difficult for me to share any earth shattering insight on Drucker’s writings and practices on management and leadership because I’m still green (as in new, not environmentally friendly, although I try to be). You see, as I posted in an older blog and video, I fell in love with business after reading Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship and figured that joining the society would allow me to expand my knowledge.

But what I realized is this: becoming one of the board members of a fledgling organization means a large commitment of time and responsibility centered on developing and growing a group from the ground up. Which also means that although I love helping the society strategize, recruit and pursue relevant projects, I’ve barely had any time to actually read, discuss and understand even one of Drucker’s books. How embarrassing that here I am, trying to be a Drucker evangelist, but I’m far from being a Drucker expert!

So tonight I took some time to read Peter F. Drucker’s The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done (Harperbusiness Essentials), considered a must read when studying Drucker’s best practices in management. I’m not far into the book, but one of its key ideas is that being effective means knowing what needs to get done. Effectiveness is not efficiency, which according to Drucker, “is the ability to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things done.” Meaning, you can become completely efficient at doing the wrong things — so completely ineffective!

If you don’t feel like reading the whole book, you can read Drucker’s article, “What Makes an Effective Executive”, which was published in an issue of Harvard Business Review from 2004; you can download the PDF version here, un gratis. (YAY!)

In the article, Drucker cites his then 65-year career as a consultant working with and observing the practices of a variety of CEO’s and world leaders. (FYI, Drucker died in 2005 just over a week before his 96th birthday). Drucker states that some of the best CEO’s he’s encountered followed the eight practices listed below:

1. Asked, “What needs to be done?”
2. Asked, “What was right for the organization?”
3. Developed action plans
4. Took responsibility for their actions
5. Took responsibility for communicating
6. Focused on opportunities rather than problems
7. Ran productive meetings
8. Thought and said “We” rather than “I”

There is one thing in the article that I do disagree with: Drucker states that an effective executive can only focus on one, or at most two, task(s) at a time. Maybe that’s the A.D.D. entrepreneur in me that’s disagreeing. I like juggling multiple tasks on most days, and then having “do or die” time when necessary. On the other hand, if I did listen to Drucker’s one or two tasks formula, perhaps I would become more effective.

I’ll try this out this week. But now I realized that focusing on one or two tasks makes picking the right task (or two) more important than ever. Such is the “reality” of the effective executive, as Drucker explains in his book…but we’ll talk about that another time.