Quotes About Efficiency

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.

The effective executive, therefore, asks: "What can my boss do really well?" "What has he done really well?" "What does he need to know to use his strength?" "What does he need to get from me to perform?" He does not worry too much over what the boss cannot do.

Work is a process, and any process needs to be controlled. To make work productive, therefore, requires building the appropriate controls into the process of work.

Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily.

Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield. Of

Managers are action-focused; they are not philosophers and should not be.

Direct results always come first. In the care and feeding of an organization, they play the role calories play in the nutrition of the human body.

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

An excess of meetings indicates that jobs have not been defined clearly, have not been structured big enough, have not been made truly responsible. Also the need for meetings indicates that the decisions and relations analyses either have not been made at all or have not been applied. The rule should be to minimize the need for people to get together to accomplish anything.

Effective executives know that their subordinates are paid to perform and not to please their superiors. They know that it does not matter how many tantrums a prima donna throws as long as she brings in the customers.

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

2. Don't diversify, don't splinter, don't try to do too many things at once. This is, of course, the corollary to the 'do': be focused!

True, the number of functional managers should always be kept at a minimum, and there should be the largest possible number of 'general' managers who manage an integrated business and are directly responsible for its performance and results. Even with the utmost application of this principle the great bulk of managers will remain in functional jobs, however. This is particularly true of the younger people. A

control has to be by feedback from the work done. The work itself has to provide the information. If it has to be checked all the time, there is no control

If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away "operating.

A well-managed plant, I soon learned, is a quiet place. A factory that is "dramatic," a factory in which the "epic of industry" is unfolded before the visitor's eyes, is poorly managed. A well-managed factory is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the crises have been anticipated and have been converted into routine.

while almost every large organization has an appraisal procedure, few of them actually use it.

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.

Peter F. Drucker

The lesson of the Ford story is that managers and management are the specific need of the business enterprise, its specific organ, and its basic structure. We can say dogmatically that enterprise cannot do without managers. One cannot argue that management does the owner's job by delegation. Management is needed not only because the job is too big for any one man to do himself, but because managing an enterprise is something essentially different from managing one's own property.

Anyone who knows Western businesses, government agencies, or educational institutions knows that their managers make far too many small decisions as a rule. And nothing causes as much trouble in an organization as a lot of small decisions.

Setting a posteriority is also unpleasant. Every posteriority is somebody else's top priority. It is much easier to draw up a nice list of top priorities and then to hedge by trying to do "just a little bit" of everything else as well. This makes everybody happy. The only drawback is, of course, that nothing whatever gets done.

It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of "managing" the boss.