The job is, however, not to set priorities. That is easy. Everybody can do it. The reason why so few executives concentrate is the difficulty of setting “posteriorities” – that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle – and of sticking to the decision.
Thus the unexpected success is not just an opportunity for innovation; it demands innovation. It forces us to ask, What basic changes are now appropriate for this organization in the way it defines its business? Its technology? Its markets? If these questions are faced up to, then the unexpected success is likely to open up the most rewarding and least risky of all innovative opportunities.
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.
But if one can lock the door, disconnect the telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a “zero draft” – the one before the first draft. From then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.
Everyone can make the wrong decision – in fact, everyone will sometimes make a wrong decision. But no one needs to make a decision which, on its face, falls short of satisfying the 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.
The assertion that “somebody else will not let me do anything” should always be suspected as a cover-up for inertia.
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.
He looks up from his work and outward toward goals. He asks: “What can I contribute that will significantly affect the performance and the results of the institution I serve?” His stress is on responsibility.
Effective executives concentrate on the few major areas where superior performance will produce outstanding results.
Effective executives, finally, make effective decisions.
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years.
Successful innovators are... not risk-focused; they are opportunity focused.
If you think training is expensive, try ignorance.
It’s not important to get things done, it’s important to get the right things done.
People are effective because they say no.
Results are gained not by solving problems, but by exploiting opportunities.
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.
At one point quantity turned into quality.