PNTV: The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker (#346)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, the Effective Executive by Peter Drucker. The Effective Executive subtitle, the definitive guide to getting the right things done. It could also be called the five Practices of Effectiveness. We've got the five practices here, which is how Peter Drucker organizes this book. Peter Drucker, of course, is one of the leading business thinkers of all time. The father of modern management, arguably the greatest business thinker of the 20th century, and an incredibly productive, prolific and lucid writer. Really enjoyed the book. I read this in Preparation for Productivity 101. As always, Philosopher's note, bunch of big ideas. We've got five of my favorites here. Let's jump in. The effective executive. We want to be effective, not busy is one of the key themes. And we need to realize that this is a learned and learnable skill. Drucker makes the point that in his 45, or whatever it was, decades of experience, he had never seen a natural effective leader or executive. It's always learned, and we learn it the same way we learn anything. Practice, practice, practice is what he Sundays. Again, the five practices here that we will take a look at now. He wrote this book in 1967 to put it in perspective and it is as timely now as it was then. So the first practice of the Effective Executive is time. Drucker makes the important point that time is our most precious asset. You can lose a lot of different things in your life and you can get that back, right? You can lose some resources or cash, you can get that back. You can even lose your health a bit. You can get that back. Once time is gone, it's gone, Period. So he says, the first thing we have to do is, is optimize our time. There are three components to optimizing your time, Peter Drucker style. Here they are. The first thing is to track, which we're gonna talk about in a moment. The second thing is to manage. And then the third thing is to consolidate. So most people, when they decide they wanna optimize their time, what do they do? They. They say, okay, well, I want to get this done, so I'm going to do this at this time, and then this at this time. They immediately start planning their days and their time. And he says that's not the wisest place to start. What you want to do is you want to start by tracking, bust out a piece of paper and pay attention to and start noting where your time currently goes. And you want to know a couple things first, the moment you start tracking anything, your improvement in that domain immediately goes up. So for example, you can have people enter a lab and give them a pedometer. Simply having a pedometer will make your. I go old school with that. Will make you walk a mile more than people who don't have a pedometer. Simply measuring something improves your performance in that domain. Now the other thing we see when we start tracking is we see just where our time is going. And you might see that you have a lot of time wasting activities and you might not be working quite as much in the deep work mode as you think. So that's our first step is we track where our time is currently going. Try this. If you've never done this before, you haven't done it in a while. Bust out a piece of paper. Starting from right now. Track your time. Even just doing it for a day or two or three will shed incredible insight on what you're doing. And again, your improvement will go up, your performance will go up immediately. Because you're not going to want to write down for three hours wasted on the Internet or I checked email for the 200th time today. Right Again, same rule applies to tracking your time, tracking your nutrition, et cetera. Track it and then what do you do? You manage it. The number one way you manage your time and the way you manage anything you want to optimize is eliminate the stuff that isn't working. Eliminate the time wasters in this context. So you tracked what needs to go, that needs to go, that needs to go. That's a total waste of time. Or I could have that person, someone else do that. That's important. That's important. Prioritize. You start managing your time. After you track it, then what do you do? The third thing is you consolidate your time. So Drucker tells us, and we'll talk about this more in concentration, that once you've tracked your time, you've eliminated the time wasters. Then you try to create the largest possible quantums of time you can. And for drucker that's not 90 minutes. We talk a lot about 90 minute time blocks oscillating on and off. For Drucker, it's half days to two weeks of focused time. If you want to be effective, you need large quantums of time in order to be effective. You can't be paper cutting yourself all day long. So that's the 1, 2, 3 of time management. Peter Drucker style. Track Manage, consolidate. That's the first practice of an effective executive. The second thing is you need to know what contribution is expected of you. So if you want to be effective rather than merely busy, the first question to ask is effective at what? What is the contribution that's being asked of me by my organization in a professional environment, or by my life in a broader sense? So for example, the way I answer that question is first and foremost, I'm the only one who can be an extraordinary husband and father to my wife and to my kids. There's a contribution that's being asked of me that I prioritize significantly and then creatively. My decision, what I believe is being asked of me, is to help people optimize their lives, give them more wisdom and less time. Short form digital content that helps them become better human beings. That's the contribution being asked of me. Okay with that. Drucker says the most important thing you get out of that, in addition to clarity on what you're supposed to be doing to be effective, is it basically forces you to step up. He says it's really a call to self improvement. Who do you need to be in order to make that contribution? It's really cool thing to think about. You want to do this well, what's the gap and how are you going to close that gap? That's the second thing here, contribution. If you want to be effective versus just busy, you got to know what's expected of you and what contribution you can make. The third practice of the effective executive is to, as he says, make your strengths productive. He's got some great wisdom here. He says, look, all strong people have strong weaknesses and they have strong. I'm sorry, they have strong strengths and they have strong weaknesses. He says they have peaks and they have valleys. That's just how it works, right? And the people who try to be well rounded, to use his language, the whole person, as he describes it, are basically committing themselves to mediocrity. He says, don't focus on your weaknesses. Focus on your strengths and lean into them so hard that you make your weaknesses irrelevant. It's a powerful statement. I should make an asterisk here, right? Focus on your strengths. With one caveat. If your weaknesses are related to character and integrity, you need to solve those issues. If it's simply you're not as good as accounting as you are at creating a vision and whatever else it is you love to do, then you want to make your strengths so strong that you can get support on your weaknesses, but you don't need to become the best accountant in the world, you need to double down on your strengths and on your talents. He uses an example, a ton of great stories politically, military, business leaders, etc. One of my favorites is Abraham Lincoln. So Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, right. He's looking for a general who will actually fight. He's got these generals that don't. They hedge and they hem and they haul. Ulysses S. Grant comes forward and he's willing to fight. That's a strength for Lincoln right. Now, as it turns out, Ulysses S. Grant also liked to drink a lot. So we've got strengths, we've got weaknesses, we've got peaks, we've got valleys. But the way that Lincoln responded to Ulysses S. Grant's strengths and weaknesses is he said, if I knew Grant's preferred brand of whiskey, I'd send a barrel to all my other generals. He knew that strengths go with weaknesses and vice versa. Let's lean into the strengths and go from there. In the note, I share a story of. For me, there's a parallel here in the great documentary the Defiant wants the Defiant Ones with Jimmy Iovini and Dr. Dre. So we've got a Lincoln and Grant. Then we've got Iovini and Dre. So Lincoln celebrates the weaknesses and the strengths of Grant in the Defiant ones. Iovini and Dr. Dre are getting ready to sell beats to Apple for like two or whatever. Was two, two and a $3 billion. Now, the deal isn't done, right? It's still confidential. No deal is done until it's done. But Dr. Dre cracks open a bottle of Ulysses S. Grant's favorite whiskey, has a little party with his buddies, creates a viral that somehow gets online and goes viral. Right? So you've got this deal that's almost consummated, but not yet. Iovini sees the video and what does he say? He says, that's the horse I rode in on. Maintains his equanimity. Yep. Strength, weakness. There we go. That's the horse I rode in on. You can't have one without the other. And that's an amazing relief for all of us. No perfect human beings have ever existed on the planet. You will not be the first. Peter Drucker tells us, lean into your strengths so hard, you make your weaknesses irrelevant. Think about your strengths. Think about how you can lean into them. And remember, Lincoln, Grant, Iovini, Dr. Dre. Yes. That is the only pop cultural reference I will make for a while. A friend of mine recommended I watch Defiant One. Super inspiring. Provided you're okay with the language. All right, so the fourth big idea here is concentration. So when we manage our time, we consolidate it ultimately. And Drucker makes the point that there will always be more good ideas than there is time to actually execute them. So what does that mean? It means we need to go back to the four disciplines of execution, get clear on our wildly important goal, say that's important to me. And then concentrate all of our energy into that particular activity. Run out of space here. But here's what he says. He says, first things first. Stephen Covey has seven habits of highly effective people. One of them is first things first. He wrote a whole book called First Things First. You know where he got that phrase from? Peter Drucker. First things first. Drucker says. Guess what he says about second things. Second things? Not at all. First things first. And the reality is, every single moment, you have a first thing that you can and should be doing if you want to operate at your highest level and be effective. Well, what's important now, sometimes that will be do whatever it is you need to do creatively. Sometimes it will be, take a break. You've been going for a work cycle of 90 minutes now. You need to recover. Sometimes it will be shut down, complete. It's digital sunset time. Go spend time with your family. First things first. Second things not at all, but only if you want to be effective. And I'll make the point again that when he talks about concentrating, he's talking about doing it over an extended period of time. He says, to do anything worthwhile, you need at least half a day chunks to two weeks. And in the note, I said, who does that? Who takes two weeks off? And he says, you need an iron determination to say no to all the potential distractions. Who does that? People that are absolutely committed to making a contribution and being effective. So check in on all the distractions. Get rid of all the second or third or fourth things. Know what your one thing is, your first thing, and do it. Fifth idea here, decisions. So the fifth practice of effective executives is they make effective decisions. And he says, you need to have a systematic way to approach making decisions. The effective executive makes less decisions, not more, than the ineffective executive. How is that possible? Because they step back and they see what's important and they make one decision that takes care of hundreds of decisions. They don't have to make the same decision again and again and again and again. Right? So he describes that as boundary conditions. One of the facets of good effective decision making is you need to know your Boundary conditions. You've got to know what qualifies as a good decision. And the example he uses is the New York Times. So the New York Times, back In the mid 20th century, there was a huge blackout in New York City, right? So all the power went out, and the only paper in New York City that was published the following morning was the New York Times. Everybody else missed a day, but they hustled over to New Jersey and they were able to get in on the printing presses of another newspaper that had some extra space. But they only had a couple hours. But it was enough time for them to print a million copies of the New York Times for the next day, which is what they needed to get out with, right? So they have these two hours, but in the middle of the production, actually, the production cycle was delayed by something like 46 minutes because the editors got in an argument about the hyphenation of one word. The entire newspaper, one word. They argued for nearly an hour about how to properly hyphenate it. And Drucker says that one of their boundary conditions was the impeccable grammar that the New York Times needed to be perfect in every single line of every single issue of their newspaper. They needed to be the standard for grammar in America. So long story a little shorter. They only printed a fraction. Less than Half of those million copies went to market the next day. Drucker says, did they make the right decision? Says absolutely. Their boundary condition was clear. Their boundary condition was no errors ever. Therefore, the measure wasn't the number of sales or copies printed and sold. It was whether they adhered to that standard. They made an effective decision. So you and I need to have boundary conditions in our lives. We are, obviously, I didn't say this in the prelude, but we are the CEOs, the chief executives of our lives. So the examples I use for boundary conditions include, the other day, I woke up and I had some ideas for some plus ones. There were some pretty good ideas. I was excited about them. Part of me wanted to hop up and immediately go type them out, right? Make sure that I captured them. But I have boundary conditions. My a.m. morning rituals are very, very, very clear in what I do. I get up, brush my teeth. I meditate for over 20 minutes, 20 minutes or so. I do a little movement for five minutes. I do a little quick journaling, and then I do my deep work. So with my boundary conditions in place, that's what I did. And I wound up writing them. I jotted down the keywords for the ideas I wanted to note But I went through my protocol the way that I do it. Super mundane example, but that's what I did. At the end of the day, let's say I'm super fired up. I've got a lot of ideas. Doesn't matter. One of my boundary conditions is digital sunset. I'm done. And I want to be sustainably productive and I'm willing to shave off a little bit of marginal productivity in some mornings or nights and follow my protocol so I can be sustainably productive over the long term. Those are my boundary conditions. Those are my bright lines, as willpower scientists would say. And then I've made the decision once, so I don't need to make the decision a ton of times. Do I need to decide whether I'm going to meditate tomorrow morning? No, I've already made that decision. We want to get into the position of playing offense with our willpower, making little decisions, making effective decisions once, so we don't need to make them a thousand times. So again, mundane examples, but we want to think about what our boundary conditions are, what the bright lines are in our lives to make decisions easier to make as we concentrate our energy. First things first. Second things, not at all. Remember your strengths. Don't try to make your weaknesses strong unless they're character or integrity flaws. Otherwise, lean into your strengths. Surround yourself with people who can support you. Their strengths are your weaknesses kind of thing, right? But make your strengths so strong they make your weaknesses irrelevant. Remember Lincoln, Grant Iovini? Dr. Dre? It's the horse you rode in on. The contribution that you are called to make. What is it and who do you need to become in order to do so? The time. 1, 2, 3. Track, manage, consolidate and be effective. What was your favorite big idea that jumped out and landed today? Think about that and as always, most importantly, think about how you can apply it to your life today. Moving from theory to practice, let's get our effectiveness on. Make today another awesome day. See ya. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian with some super exciting news. 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