Quotes About Effectiveness

Management is about human beings. Its task is to make people capable of joint performance, to make their strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results.

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective.

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.

Follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.

Effectiveness must be learned.

The knowledge that we consider knowledge proves itself in action. What we now mean by knowledge is information in action, information focused on results.

The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.

Is this still worth doing?" And if it isn't, he gets rid of it so as to be able to concentrate on the few tasks that, if done with excellence, will really make a difference in the results of his own job and in the performance of his organization.

The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.

Brilliant men are often strikingly ineffectual; they fail to realize that the brilliant insight is not by itself achievement. They never have learned that insights become effectiveness only through hard systematic work.

The oft-repeated quip, "I'm sorry to write you a long letter, as I did not have time to write a short one," could be applied to meetings: "I'm sorry to imprison you in this long meeting, as I did not have time to prepare a short one.

But there seems to be little correlation between a man's effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination or his knowledge.

Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is defined by its results.

The subject of this book is managing oneself for effectiveness.

An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment. And yet the bigger and apparently more successful an organization gets to be, the more will inside events tend to engage the interests, the energies, and the abilities of the executive to the exclusion of his real tasks and his real effectiveness in the outside.

Effectiveness is, after all, not a «subject», but a selfdiscipline.

Executives are not paid for doing things they like to do. They are paid for getting the right things done—most of all in their specific task, the making of effective decisions.

The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values. Working relationships are as much based on the people as they are on the work.

tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse. He either operates or he doesn't. Similarly, the effective decision-maker either acts or he doesn't act. He does not take half-action. This is the one thing that is always wrong, and the one sure way not to satisfy the minimum specifications, the minimum boundary conditions.

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done.

This is the "secret" of those people who "do so many things" and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.

Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge are essential resources, but only effectiveness converts them into results. By themselves, they only set limits to what can be attained.

Peter F. Drucker