The Effective Executive

1: First, manage thyself.

When Michael Jordan was reaching the end of his basketball career, he could no longer fly to the basket with the same height and power as when he was younger, so he began to build a strength he’d never previously had: a fadeaway jumper. He eradicated a crucial weakness within his strength, turning his fadeaway jumper into yet another Jordan-can-kill-you strength on the court. Do what you’re made for, yes, but then get better and better; eradicate weakness, yes, but only within strength.

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process:

Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization for one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time. In an ideally designed structure (which in a changing world is of course only a dream) there would be no meetings. Everybody would know what he needs to know to do his job. Everyone would have the resources available to him to do his job. We meet because people holding different jobs have to cooperate to get a specific task done. We meet because the knowledge and experience needed in a specific situation are not available in one head, but have to be pieced together out of the experience and knowledge of several people. (View Highlight)