the-effective-executive.md

the-effective-executive.md

Foreword:

• Even people with tremendous brilliance are strikingly ineffectual. Druker's pricniples in this book help up become more effective.
• 10 principles
  • Manage yourself first. The ratio of leader's performance to those on the team remains constant.
  • Do what you're made for. Find what you do uncommonly well, and then navigate your life and career in direct alignment. Address difficulties that directly impede your strengths.
  • Work in your best work style.
  • Count your time, make it count. Keep track of metric: number of good hours spent each day. Have long uninterrupted work sessions.
  • Prepare for meetings. Spend more time preparing for them, than the meeting themselves.
  • Make a few big generic decision that can apply to a large range of things.
  • Find your one big distinctive impact.
  • Stop what you would not start.
  • Run lean.
  • Be useful.

Preface:

• First manage yourself. Set an example.
• Effectiveness is something you need to learn (a small number of practices). No one has these qualities inborn, they must learn them.
• An effective executive doesn't have a specific personality type, anyone works. All they need to do is follow these 8 practices:
  • Answer: what needs to be done?
  • Answer: what is right for the enterprise?
  • develop action plans
  • take responsibility for decisions
  • take responsibility for communicating
  • focus on opportunities, rather than problems
  • ran productive meetings
  • say "we" rather than "I"
• Get the knowledge you need (based on what needs to be done).
  • Take tutorials and learn everything you can about the topic. Focus on just 1 or 2 tasks. You cannot be effective if you take more than that, set priorities.
  • If there are tasks which you're not the best equipped to deal with, delegate the task; and give other people responsibility over it.
• Is this right for the enterprise? Act in line for that. Keep unnecessary biases aside.
• Write an action plan.
  • Ask questions: What contributions should the enterprise expect from me over the next 18 months to two years? What results will I commit to? With what deadlines?
  • Ask questions: Are these compatible with the organization's values?
  • The plan needs to be flexible for revision.
  • There must be a system in place to check results against expectations.
  • The action plan fully determines how the executive should spend his time.
  • Have review sessions to evaluate plans.
• Act.
  • To delegate responsibility, you should have: the name of the person accountable, the deadline
  • Periodically review decisions.
  • Do not tolerate nonperforming individuals at important jobs.
• Communicating. Share plans and get feedback from team (peers and superiors).
• Opportunities:
  • keep an eye out on what the competition is doing so that you can take exploit them
  • keep your best people on opportunities, rather than problems
• Make meetings productive. Have follow ups. Terminate them early if the mission is accomplished.
• Listen first, speak last

Chapter 1: effectiveness can be learned

• five practices that make you effective:
  • know where your time goes, systematically manage it
  • focus on "contribution" rather than just working. ask "what results are expected of me?" and take a top down approach
  • build on your strengths, sharpen only those weakness which impede your strengths
  • concentrate on areas where superior performance will bring outstanding results
  • make judgements based on "dissenting opinions" rather than concensus on facts (to avoid group think). focus on taking few good decisions correctly, everything else will fall in place.

Chapter 2: Know thy time

• Instead of planning time, finetune your already existing schedule. THis cna be done in three steps:
  • record time
  • manage time
  • consilidate time (into continous chunks)
• The output is limited by the scarest resource, and in our case, it is time. Managing it well is the key to effecting output.
• Most people don't know how they spend their time. You cannot estimate it from memory, you need to record it.
• There are many demands on your time, and most of these are a waste.
• To have effectiveness, you need a fairly large quantum of time. To spend in one stretch less than minimum is a sheer waste.
• As the number of people who need to interact increases, the time spent interacting dominates the time spent working.
• Diagnozing time:
  • Remove all things in your calendar that don't contribute to the output of the organization.
  • Which of the activities on my time log could be done by others (just as well or better)? (eg. travel, dinners, meetings, etc.)
  • Remove the time you waste. Ask people "what do I do that wastes your time without contributing to your effectiveness?"
• Pruning the time-wasters:
  • The recurrent crisis. Recognize it and diffuse it early. In a well-managed organization, things are dull and routine; there's no crisis coming up.
  • Time wastes from overstaffing.
  • Bad organization. We either meet or work, not both. If >25% time meeting, it's an unproductive environment.
• The "discretionary time" you have won't be a lot: no matter how ruthlessly you prune time-wasters.

Chapter 3: Focus on contribution

• "What can I do that will significantly affect and performance and results of the company?"
• Focus more on "how your work contributes to the company" rather than "how you're responsible to supervising other"
• Always set your sights on contribution, the sights of everyone who you work with raise as well.
• When your role changes, you need to change how you spend your time accordingly.
• "What what I uniquely capable to make the most contributions at?"
• Ask your superiors "What contribution from me do you require to make your contribution to the organization? When do you need this, how do you need it, and in what form?"
• Ask your subordinates "What are the contributions for which this organization and I, your superior, should hold you accountable? What should we expect of you? What is the best utilization of your knowledge and your ability?"
• "Who has to use my output for it to become effective?"
• “What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?” asks in effect, “What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skill do I have to acquire to make the contribution I should be making? What strengths do I have to put to work? What standards do I have to set myself?”
• Effective executives insit that meetings serve a purpose, and ask for things to be spelled out before the meeting. They ensure that the meeting sticks to these objectives. He then, at the end of the meeting, connects the takeaways to the original agenda.
• In meetings, focus on contribution, not talking.

Chapter 4: Making Strength Productive

• Use the strength of each man as a building block for joint performance.
• Pick people based on their strengths, ignore their weaknesses (as long as they don't deteriorate performance on their strengths). Their weaknesses are often irrelevant. Everyone has weaknesses. Focus on what he can do.
• You never suffer when your subordinates are strong and effective.
• It doesn't matter if they always complain, as long as they're effective. Always focus on "What can he contribute uncommonly well?"
• Relationships should be task-focused. Achievement must be measure against objective criteria of contribution and performance. It doesn't matter if you like the other person, as a friend; don't focus on that.
• Make each job of the subordinate "big", that demands his best performance.
• When you join an organization, gauge where you can make the most contributions.
• Make sure that the company you're working for shares your values -- it keeps you more motivated.
• Young workers should ask "Am I in the right work and in the right place for my strengths to tell?" The job should not be too small or easy (as it might not bring out the best you can do)
• The ones who abilities are challenged, are enthusiastic. Those who are frustrated say "my abilities are not being put to good use"
• Appraisals should be focused on strength, not weaknesses.
• Everyone is good for specific tasks. Noone is good for all tasks.
• Use the strengths of your superior to the best degree. "what can my boss do really well? what does he need to get from me to perform well?"

Chapter 5: first things first

• Secret to effectiveness is concentration, and doing one thing at a time.
• There's always more valuable contirbutions you can make than there is time for.
• Fix one problem at a time, spend time on it extensively and fix most issues before moving onto a new one.
• Work at a slow steady pace, don't try to pace harder compromising the effectiveness of the work.
• Give up things that are unproductive, don't continue to focus on things that you've learnt are not effective.
• Assume that any commitment you make, automatically expires in a two months unless you clearly see that it's needed.
• You need to focus on the timing, make the contributions that the organization needs right now.
• Focus on what's needed next, more than maintaining past equilibrium

Chapter 6: Decision making

• This is one of the tasks of an executive. Effective executives make effective decisions.
• Focus on making a few important decisions right. Don't focus on the speed of decision making.
• Don't fall for the sunk cost fallacy. Actively work on making everything that's used today obselete with new technologies.
• Rules for decisions
  • if there's a generic problem, have rules / principles that guide these decisions
  • focus on building general principles for each decision. so that you can do things quicker.

Chapter 7: Effective decisions

• Understand that we start with opinions (not facts), to make decisions. Don't pick the consensus, analyse opinions and pick the one that's most plausible.
• When you make a opinion, make precise predictions about how it can be tested.
• Find the right measurements you need to test your opinions.
• Don't make a decision unless there's a disagreement. We need to have conflicting arguments to make good decisions.
• People try to come up with decisions that satisfy the boss, the only way to ensure this is not happening is to support disagreement / conflicting views.
• Always study alternatives fully before making a decision.
• Find out why people are disagree. Assume that people are right minded. Understand people's perspectives fully before making judgements about what the right decision is.
• Ask "is the decision really necessary?"
• Don't waste time runnning additional studies, unless the current one is clearly inadequate for some reason.

Chapter 8: Warp up

Summary: This is a great book that enjoyed reading and helps me think more clearly about how I need to act to make the most contributions as an executive. Some of the ideas presented here are things that I already naturally follow, and that helps me connect more deeply. I love the ideas of having task-focused relationships, focusing on leveraging strengths (of myself and others), thinking clear about how to make most contributions, focusing only on high-contribution tasks.

Introspection:

• What do I do uncommonly well? I implementing things (in ML) quickly, I'm good at running sanity checks and getting things to work.
• My work:
  • What needs to be done? Building that hardware-efficient AIS / FRC algorithm.
    • How can I learn more about the task? I have good knowledge of the AI side of things, but to have a good knowledge of the hardware, I need to interact with the hardware teams more. So I need to keep reading and discussing those ideas with the hardware team. This is an important thing I need to do for the long term effectiveness in the orf.