The Effective Executive. This is a very famous book among a collection of many other famous books by Mr. Peter Drucker. This book discusses only one thing: how to become a top-level leader.
Mr. Peter Drucker stated that in this era, anyone can become a leader. And a top leader must know the methods of leading and managing themselves first. This book was completed in 1966. The author raised many concrete examples from large companies of that time. And all these management techniques are still of immense benefit to the new managers of this later generation.
Speaking of leadership, knowing how to use people effectively to allow them to reach their full potential is still a question that has no standard answer. And it is a question that every leader must ask themselves. We are fortunate to have come across this book at this time. Even if we don't yet have a large business or have to manage thousands of people, the knowledge in this book can truly help our thinking and our management capabilities develop to another level.
As for the question that asks how to become a top leader, let's first answer the four questions below.
Question 1: Why is it said that working with efficiency is a problem faced by every manager?
Question 2: To become a top manager, how must we manage our time?
Question 3: They say, 'crooked wood is for making wheel hubs, straight wood is for making vehicles.' So how can we know who is the crooked wood and who is the straight wood?
Question 4: To become a top manager, what important decisions do we need to make?
Without wasting any more time, let's get to the first point. Why is completing work with effectiveness a problem faced by every manager?
In most books that talk about leadership, they only talk about how to lead other people. But in this book, it teaches us to learn how to manage ourselves first, before we manage other people. If we can't even manage ourselves, it is very difficult to go and manage others.
Why does the author place so much importance on the work effectiveness of managers themselves? Speaking of this point, let's look at the author's history a little. After this book appeared on the market in 1966, a few years after World War II, many large companies emerged in the United States. And they also saw the presence of a number of new leaders and managers who were in the process of managing those companies. But they lacked knowledge and experience, and they didn't know how to manage those companies to be good. Day in and day out, they worked as if there was no effectiveness. That is why Mr. Peter Drucker raised a number of questions to those managers and leaders with the aim of increasing their work effectiveness, because this is a very important reason that makes a company or a business succeed or fail.
If managers work without effectiveness, the business cannot move forward. In this era, we all know that some managers use many smart programs to increase their work effectiveness. But more than 50 years ago, this gap was a chronic disease that caused a business to fail or a company to collapse.
The author stated that to become a manager with effectiveness, it requires us to know two words. That is, what is called effectiveness, and what is called a manager. First, let's look at what is called effectiveness. In the mid-20th century, they managed people's work effectiveness by implementing Taylor's principles of scientific management, which they called Taylor Scientific Management.
They emphasized work effectiveness through measuring the actual work results. For example, how many pairs of shoes are produced in a day, how many sets of clothes are sewn, and so on. Just by looking, you know immediately; it's very easy to measure. But in later times, there were many changes because people's work didn't use as much manual labor. People who work using their brains are increasing more and more, and they play an increasingly important role in managing each institution.
It is difficult to weigh the work effectiveness of people who work using their brains because their work is not about doing the same things over and over using only manual labor. They need to find a new way to get a job done. So how can we weigh the work effectiveness of this type of personnel?
The author emphasized a word called "contribution," which is the participation in providing something to the company and the nation. The company is the lifeblood of society. They participate in helping to boost economic growth. They provide services or create products to serve society. For example, a hospital must take care of the sick, a school must educate students, and so on. For personnel who work using their brains, what they create is creativity. Whether it is a product or a service, they must make it highly beneficial to society and users.
For their work to be beneficial to users, it requires them to observe the needs of customers, to understand the market clearly, not to work quietly alone, researching and creating something that has no demand in the market. Not only that, they also have to present those products or services to customers or users to understand them further.
In summary, measuring the work effectiveness of later-generation workers, or new-generation workers who use intelligence instead of physical strength, refers to the results they have provided to society.
Now that we are clear on what is called effectiveness, let's look at what is called a manager. The author stated that a manager must be a person who works with intelligence, not using physical strength anymore. His work must have contributed to the growth of his institution, providing results as a substantial chunk of something to the company. Conversely, the factor that measures whether he is a good manager or leader or not is not based on how many subordinates or staff he has under him. It also does not refer to the title he puts on his desk, but they look at the results he has provided to the company or his institution. If he is a person who has contributed in this way, it means that even if he has only one staff member under his authority, it can be said that he is a manager or a leader.
Conversely, for example, a time-checking guard who walks up and down in a factory. His job is to see which staff are working or if any staff are being lazy. Can he be considered a manager? No. Because he is only checking the time. He is not responsible for the entire work result, and he does not have a strong influence on the entire operation.
Therefore, to become a full-fledged manager, you must ensure that your work has contributed to being responsible for both the right and wrong aspects of the entire operation or one part of it. The author said that in the world of work that he has been involved in for more than 45 years, he has never met anyone who was born to be a leader. Even if he has knowledge, experience, and a high level of culture, it does not mean that he can become a leader or a top manager. Conversely, some people misunderstand that having high knowledge shows that they have the ability to be a leader. Not necessarily. A construction foreman may have more ability and better leadership qualities than you think.
Why is just wanting to become a leader who works effectively so difficult? This is because most of a manager's time is spent with other people, not their own personal time. His working hours are often interrupted by people, such as while working, a subordinate comes to ask for advice. There are meetings with the leadership, appointments with partners, answering customer questions, and so on, especially work that happens suddenly beyond expectations. Whatever happens, the manager is the one who comes out to solve it all the time. This makes it difficult for them to have enough personal time to think about which work is important.
Moreover, the work results of a manager are not immediately effective. Only when the work team performs well can we see the qualities of that manager. This shows that managers spend a lot of time discussing with their superiors and communicating with other departments in the company, which makes them busy with internal work and not paying attention to providing good products or services to customers in the market.
This is why they say that most managers work without effectiveness. In fact, they work a lot, but their work takes time to show results, and those results cannot be seen with the naked eye. Therefore, if you are a manager, you must learn how to work effectively.
The good news is that training yourself to become a person who works effectively is not a difficult thing, and it does not require you to be born with it. If you learn to grasp the techniques and some key points, and also practice it until it becomes a habit, then you will become a manager with high work effectiveness without realizing it.
The above is an explanation of the question that asks, "Why is high work effectiveness a problem for every leader?" Effective work is work that can show immediate, tangible results. But unfortunately, the work of most managers is to solve problems that occur on a daily basis. It is difficult to show tangible work results for the boss to see. Therefore, it requires a special ability, which is to work effectively first, through the use of techniques and correct methods, and to know how to train oneself until it becomes a in the future.
Next, we come to the second important point, which is the most important point in this book. We will introduce to all of you three methods for working effectively, which are: knowing how to manage time, knowing how to use people according to their talents, and knowing how to make decisions correctly.
Let's look at the first point. How should a manager manage their time to be effective? At the beginning, we have already mentioned that a problem that every manager encounters on a daily basis is that he is always busy solving other people's problems and rarely gets to do his own things. He is always being interrupted, whether it is a small matter or a big one, and the higher the position, the bigger the company, the more things there are.
For example, managers in large companies often spend a lot of time attending business networking events, meeting with clients, having lunch with partners, and paying courtesy calls on leaders of related organizations. This kind of work does not allow the manager to immediately demonstrate their abilities within the company. What is more worrying than this is that there are few managers who know that they are wasting time, and they don't even know what they have done in a day, how time should be allocated, and which work is more important, and so on.
In fact, a chairman of a company's board of directors came to consult with Mr. Peter, and he said that one-third of his time is spent on meetings with the leadership, another third is spent on meeting clients, and the remaining one-third is for building relationships with other companies. When Peter heard this, he had his secretary track the daily activities of this board chairman for three consecutive months. The results showed that he spent most of his time on daily meetings within the company, such as making phone calls, ordering things, walking up and down, and checking on things in the office. And this was different from what he had said.
Therefore, the author wants to emphasize that as a manager, even if you don't respect yourself, you should respect your own time. To do this, it is not too difficult. You just need to record the time and the work you have to do every day. What you need to pay attention to at this point is not to trust your memory too much. You must record immediately what you are doing at this moment. You shouldn't do it and then record it, because you might forget.
When you have the habit of recording the things you do every day, the next thing you need to do is to cut out any unnecessary activities that waste your precious time. Managers should often ask themselves: what are the things you don't have to do, what are the things you should delegate to others to do, and you should also ask yourself what things are disturbing other people's time. For example, there is no important work at all, but you call a meeting that lasts for two or three hours. You have to know that if one person spends two hours, ten people will have wasted twenty hours. This is equivalent to two working days. Because some things are really not necessary. A message or an email can be communicated clearly. Why waste time coming to a meeting and sitting for hours?
Through experience, the author has seen that as long as a manager records the things they have to do every day, they will be able to see that there are many unnecessary tasks that are causing them to waste time. For things like this, if you can cancel them, you should cancel them. If you can delegate them, you should delegate them.
Besides this, another thing that gives managers a headache every day is operations, or mistakes that happen repeatedly every day. There is a saying that says: make difficult things ordinary, and make ordinary and repetitive things have a standard. In fact, to solve problems that occur repeatedly every day, there should be a customary law or standard for imposing penalties correctly. Customary laws and internal regulations can all help to facilitate the work of managers to a large extent.
For example, previously, the law of the US Department of Defense stipulated that the annual budget, if not fully spent, must be returned to the national budget. This kind of stipulation caused soldiers and leaders of the Department of Defense to be busy at the end of every year, trying to figure out how to spend their budget before the end of the year. They only thought about ways to spend, not about doing important work on a large scale.
Later, the new Secretary of Defense of the United States issued a new bill which stated that the unspent budget can be put into a temporary account, which can be used in the next year. Filling this loophole in the new law has made soldiers and leaders more effective in their work than before and has eliminated a lot of corruption.
The author also mentioned that if a company or a factory has times when it is idle and times when it is very busy, it may be due to poor management. A well-managed factory has a steady and stable operation, without too many unexpected events. Because every event that might happen can be predicted in advance, and they have allocated methods to solve those problems well and have standards as well.
The CEO of the electronics company Haier has applied this strategy. After reading this book, he created a very famous daily work completion method to be implemented in his company. He had the work team experiment and test doing all kinds of work, and when they encountered any problem, they had to solve it immediately. They also had a mechanism and standard for solving those problems in detail. When other personnel encounter similar problems later on, they can use these problem-solving solutions to solve them by themselves easily.
Besides wasting time due to poor management and encountering repetitive daily problems, there are also cases of too many staff, too frequent meetings, and inefficient communication between departments, which are all a waste of time. But even if the above problems have solutions, the manager's time is still limited. The time he can work on his own is only about one-fourth of his total working hours. And not knowing how to use the little time left makes the work even less effective.
For example, you have lunch at 1 o'clock and you have a meeting at 1:30. Do you know how to use these 30 minutes effectively? Some tasks require a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a high level of concentration. For example, writing an article or summarizing a book like this. We need more than 60 hours to read and understand the important content in a book. And we spend another 8 to 10 hours to write a 10-page summary article. If we close the door of the room, turn off the phone, and focus on writing it, then in 7 to 8 hours, we can definitely write a decent summary article. But if we sit down to write for not even 30 minutes and someone calls us to go down and pick up something we bought online, or we write a few lines and a colleague messages us to ask about work, then we can't really focus on writing the article or summary well.
The third step in managing time well is to know how to collect small pieces of time to do big tasks effectively. The third step in managing time well is to know how to collect small pieces of time to do big tasks. There are many ways to do this. For example, you can set aside a whole day to do small, miscellaneous tasks, tasks that take a short time to solve but you can get a lot done. By doing this, those small tasks won't bother you every day anymore.
Your working time is really important. If you don't know how to use it effectively, then you won't be able to accomplish any big, substantial tasks. Focus on doing one thing at a time during a certain period, and whatever is important and urgent should be done first. So how do you know which task is more urgent or more important? There are so many things to do, how should we prioritize them?
At this point, the author raised two techniques. First, don't let yourself be busy with work from yesterday. Some things, once you start doing them, you just want to get them done. Even though this thing is meaningless for our work, we can't just throw it away. For things like this, we must stop them immediately and be decisive. For example, some companies achieve success because of a certain product that is receiving strong support in the market. But that product can no longer meet the market demand. At that point, the company should not regret the old product, trying to create a market to promote an outdated product that has no demand anymore. Instead, you should have new innovations, research, and create new products.
Second, you should not prioritize work based on pressure. Sometimes, things with high pressure look very big, but they are not necessarily important. But some things that are important, we tend to overlook them. For example, thinking about the business strategy for your company. If we prioritize work in this way, we will definitely put this kind of important work last. We'll think about it a little later. We'll talk about it in a while. And we all know that if we use the word "wait," then we will never get it done.
The above is just one way that can make you become a leader with effectiveness, which is to know how to manage time correctly. To manage time well, you have to learn to record the things you have to do in a day, reduce any unnecessary things, and then gather small pieces of time to do one thing. At the same time, you have to know how to prioritize work, do what is important and urgent first, and don't do too many things at once.
Next, we come to the second important point, which is: a good manager knows how to use people according to their talents. We always want good people, talented people to work for us, such as having the ability to solve problems, having high creativity, having leadership qualities, being good at communication, having various other professional skills, and so on. A person who is good at everything is not easy to find.
In fact, in the job market, there are two other types of people: people with outstanding strengths and weaknesses, and people with ordinary abilities who are not outstanding in any particular area. Of these two groups of people, which one would you choose? In fact, everyone has their shortcomings. As a manager, you have to know how to use people according to the talents they have, as the Cambodian saying goes: "crooked wood is for making wheel hubs, straight wood is for making vehicles." A manager should not just look at the weaknesses of their staff. Instead, they should often ask themselves, "What can he do well?" The mission of a manager is not to change him, but to help him use his strengths to bring out his abilities to the maximum.
A brilliant manager not only knows how to use the people under his authority to work well, but also knows how to manage his superiors. Superiors or bosses are also human. They also have weaknesses. And knowing how to use your superiors to work for you can really facilitate your work as a manager a lot. If your boss is a good communicator, you can ask your boss to meet important clients with you. This makes it even more likely to succeed.
Finally, a manager must know themselves, know themselves well first before knowing others. Some people, when their work is not up to par, they like to complain and blame others, blame the company, blame the product. In fact, if you are a person who truly loves your work, loves the work you are doing, you will explore all means to make that work successful. Don't try to force yourself to do something you don't want to do. You should do something that matches your talents and your passions, then you will grow quickly.
The last important point in this book is that it teaches us to know how to make decisions correctly. We always think that a good manager probably needs to make many decisions every day. But in fact, a brilliant manager only makes decisions on big matters. But what is more important than this is the implementation of the work. If you spend all day just making decisions without any implementation, then you will still not get good results.
Moreover, some things do not require a decision to be made, because every decision has its risks. Sometimes, not making a decision is also a decision. But once a decision is made, you must do it well, do it to completion. You can't just make a decision and then have no action. Usually, a good decision is one that has gone through a fierce and tense debate.
If a strategy is just proposed and everyone immediately thinks it's good, without any discussion, without any debate, then it is not a decision with effectiveness. In this book, the author quoted the words of the CEO of General Electric, who said to the author, "I have only one request. I hope you can write down what you think is right. You don't have to worry about our opinions, and you don't have to worry whether we agree or not." The above words are truly what every manager should learn from.
The author also advised that for problems that occur repeatedly, you must find the root of the problem and formulate it into a procedure to solve the problem. Make it so that the staff can easily implement it without having to make too many decisions.
Mr. Peter Drucker stated that in this era, anyone can become a leader. And a top leader must know the methods of leading and managing themselves first. This book was completed in 1966. The author raised many concrete examples from large companies of that time. And all these management techniques are still of immense benefit to the new managers of this later generation.
Speaking of leadership, knowing how to use people effectively to allow them to reach their full potential is still a question that has no standard answer. And it is a question that every leader must ask themselves. We are fortunate to have come across this book at this time. Even if we don't yet have a large business or have to manage thousands of people, the knowledge in this book can truly help our thinking and our management capabilities develop to another level.
As for the question that asks how to become a top leader, let's first answer the four questions below.
Question 1: Why is it said that working with efficiency is a problem faced by every manager?
Question 2: To become a top manager, how must we manage our time?
Question 3: They say, 'crooked wood is for making wheel hubs, straight wood is for making vehicles.' So how can we know who is the crooked wood and who is the straight wood?
Question 4: To become a top manager, what important decisions do we need to make?
Without wasting any more time, let's get to the first point. Why is completing work with effectiveness a problem faced by every manager?
In most books that talk about leadership, they only talk about how to lead other people. But in this book, it teaches us to learn how to manage ourselves first, before we manage other people. If we can't even manage ourselves, it is very difficult to go and manage others.
Why does the author place so much importance on the work effectiveness of managers themselves? Speaking of this point, let's look at the author's history a little. After this book appeared on the market in 1966, a few years after World War II, many large companies emerged in the United States. And they also saw the presence of a number of new leaders and managers who were in the process of managing those companies. But they lacked knowledge and experience, and they didn't know how to manage those companies to be good. Day in and day out, they worked as if there was no effectiveness. That is why Mr. Peter Drucker raised a number of questions to those managers and leaders with the aim of increasing their work effectiveness, because this is a very important reason that makes a company or a business succeed or fail.
If managers work without effectiveness, the business cannot move forward. In this era, we all know that some managers use many smart programs to increase their work effectiveness. But more than 50 years ago, this gap was a chronic disease that caused a business to fail or a company to collapse.
The author stated that to become a manager with effectiveness, it requires us to know two words. That is, what is called effectiveness, and what is called a manager. First, let's look at what is called effectiveness. In the mid-20th century, they managed people's work effectiveness by implementing Taylor's principles of scientific management, which they called Taylor Scientific Management.
They emphasized work effectiveness through measuring the actual work results. For example, how many pairs of shoes are produced in a day, how many sets of clothes are sewn, and so on. Just by looking, you know immediately; it's very easy to measure. But in later times, there were many changes because people's work didn't use as much manual labor. People who work using their brains are increasing more and more, and they play an increasingly important role in managing each institution.
It is difficult to weigh the work effectiveness of people who work using their brains because their work is not about doing the same things over and over using only manual labor. They need to find a new way to get a job done. So how can we weigh the work effectiveness of this type of personnel?
The author emphasized a word called "contribution," which is the participation in providing something to the company and the nation. The company is the lifeblood of society. They participate in helping to boost economic growth. They provide services or create products to serve society. For example, a hospital must take care of the sick, a school must educate students, and so on. For personnel who work using their brains, what they create is creativity. Whether it is a product or a service, they must make it highly beneficial to society and users.
For their work to be beneficial to users, it requires them to observe the needs of customers, to understand the market clearly, not to work quietly alone, researching and creating something that has no demand in the market. Not only that, they also have to present those products or services to customers or users to understand them further.
In summary, measuring the work effectiveness of later-generation workers, or new-generation workers who use intelligence instead of physical strength, refers to the results they have provided to society.
Now that we are clear on what is called effectiveness, let's look at what is called a manager. The author stated that a manager must be a person who works with intelligence, not using physical strength anymore. His work must have contributed to the growth of his institution, providing results as a substantial chunk of something to the company. Conversely, the factor that measures whether he is a good manager or leader or not is not based on how many subordinates or staff he has under him. It also does not refer to the title he puts on his desk, but they look at the results he has provided to the company or his institution. If he is a person who has contributed in this way, it means that even if he has only one staff member under his authority, it can be said that he is a manager or a leader.
Conversely, for example, a time-checking guard who walks up and down in a factory. His job is to see which staff are working or if any staff are being lazy. Can he be considered a manager? No. Because he is only checking the time. He is not responsible for the entire work result, and he does not have a strong influence on the entire operation.
Therefore, to become a full-fledged manager, you must ensure that your work has contributed to being responsible for both the right and wrong aspects of the entire operation or one part of it. The author said that in the world of work that he has been involved in for more than 45 years, he has never met anyone who was born to be a leader. Even if he has knowledge, experience, and a high level of culture, it does not mean that he can become a leader or a top manager. Conversely, some people misunderstand that having high knowledge shows that they have the ability to be a leader. Not necessarily. A construction foreman may have more ability and better leadership qualities than you think.
Why is just wanting to become a leader who works effectively so difficult? This is because most of a manager's time is spent with other people, not their own personal time. His working hours are often interrupted by people, such as while working, a subordinate comes to ask for advice. There are meetings with the leadership, appointments with partners, answering customer questions, and so on, especially work that happens suddenly beyond expectations. Whatever happens, the manager is the one who comes out to solve it all the time. This makes it difficult for them to have enough personal time to think about which work is important.
Moreover, the work results of a manager are not immediately effective. Only when the work team performs well can we see the qualities of that manager. This shows that managers spend a lot of time discussing with their superiors and communicating with other departments in the company, which makes them busy with internal work and not paying attention to providing good products or services to customers in the market.
This is why they say that most managers work without effectiveness. In fact, they work a lot, but their work takes time to show results, and those results cannot be seen with the naked eye. Therefore, if you are a manager, you must learn how to work effectively.
The good news is that training yourself to become a person who works effectively is not a difficult thing, and it does not require you to be born with it. If you learn to grasp the techniques and some key points, and also practice it until it becomes a habit, then you will become a manager with high work effectiveness without realizing it.
The above is an explanation of the question that asks, "Why is high work effectiveness a problem for every leader?" Effective work is work that can show immediate, tangible results. But unfortunately, the work of most managers is to solve problems that occur on a daily basis. It is difficult to show tangible work results for the boss to see. Therefore, it requires a special ability, which is to work effectively first, through the use of techniques and correct methods, and to know how to train oneself until it becomes a in the future.
Next, we come to the second important point, which is the most important point in this book. We will introduce to all of you three methods for working effectively, which are: knowing how to manage time, knowing how to use people according to their talents, and knowing how to make decisions correctly.
Let's look at the first point. How should a manager manage their time to be effective? At the beginning, we have already mentioned that a problem that every manager encounters on a daily basis is that he is always busy solving other people's problems and rarely gets to do his own things. He is always being interrupted, whether it is a small matter or a big one, and the higher the position, the bigger the company, the more things there are.
For example, managers in large companies often spend a lot of time attending business networking events, meeting with clients, having lunch with partners, and paying courtesy calls on leaders of related organizations. This kind of work does not allow the manager to immediately demonstrate their abilities within the company. What is more worrying than this is that there are few managers who know that they are wasting time, and they don't even know what they have done in a day, how time should be allocated, and which work is more important, and so on.
In fact, a chairman of a company's board of directors came to consult with Mr. Peter, and he said that one-third of his time is spent on meetings with the leadership, another third is spent on meeting clients, and the remaining one-third is for building relationships with other companies. When Peter heard this, he had his secretary track the daily activities of this board chairman for three consecutive months. The results showed that he spent most of his time on daily meetings within the company, such as making phone calls, ordering things, walking up and down, and checking on things in the office. And this was different from what he had said.
Therefore, the author wants to emphasize that as a manager, even if you don't respect yourself, you should respect your own time. To do this, it is not too difficult. You just need to record the time and the work you have to do every day. What you need to pay attention to at this point is not to trust your memory too much. You must record immediately what you are doing at this moment. You shouldn't do it and then record it, because you might forget.
When you have the habit of recording the things you do every day, the next thing you need to do is to cut out any unnecessary activities that waste your precious time. Managers should often ask themselves: what are the things you don't have to do, what are the things you should delegate to others to do, and you should also ask yourself what things are disturbing other people's time. For example, there is no important work at all, but you call a meeting that lasts for two or three hours. You have to know that if one person spends two hours, ten people will have wasted twenty hours. This is equivalent to two working days. Because some things are really not necessary. A message or an email can be communicated clearly. Why waste time coming to a meeting and sitting for hours?
Through experience, the author has seen that as long as a manager records the things they have to do every day, they will be able to see that there are many unnecessary tasks that are causing them to waste time. For things like this, if you can cancel them, you should cancel them. If you can delegate them, you should delegate them.
Besides this, another thing that gives managers a headache every day is operations, or mistakes that happen repeatedly every day. There is a saying that says: make difficult things ordinary, and make ordinary and repetitive things have a standard. In fact, to solve problems that occur repeatedly every day, there should be a customary law or standard for imposing penalties correctly. Customary laws and internal regulations can all help to facilitate the work of managers to a large extent.
For example, previously, the law of the US Department of Defense stipulated that the annual budget, if not fully spent, must be returned to the national budget. This kind of stipulation caused soldiers and leaders of the Department of Defense to be busy at the end of every year, trying to figure out how to spend their budget before the end of the year. They only thought about ways to spend, not about doing important work on a large scale.
Later, the new Secretary of Defense of the United States issued a new bill which stated that the unspent budget can be put into a temporary account, which can be used in the next year. Filling this loophole in the new law has made soldiers and leaders more effective in their work than before and has eliminated a lot of corruption.
The author also mentioned that if a company or a factory has times when it is idle and times when it is very busy, it may be due to poor management. A well-managed factory has a steady and stable operation, without too many unexpected events. Because every event that might happen can be predicted in advance, and they have allocated methods to solve those problems well and have standards as well.
The CEO of the electronics company Haier has applied this strategy. After reading this book, he created a very famous daily work completion method to be implemented in his company. He had the work team experiment and test doing all kinds of work, and when they encountered any problem, they had to solve it immediately. They also had a mechanism and standard for solving those problems in detail. When other personnel encounter similar problems later on, they can use these problem-solving solutions to solve them by themselves easily.
Besides wasting time due to poor management and encountering repetitive daily problems, there are also cases of too many staff, too frequent meetings, and inefficient communication between departments, which are all a waste of time. But even if the above problems have solutions, the manager's time is still limited. The time he can work on his own is only about one-fourth of his total working hours. And not knowing how to use the little time left makes the work even less effective.
For example, you have lunch at 1 o'clock and you have a meeting at 1:30. Do you know how to use these 30 minutes effectively? Some tasks require a lot of time, a lot of energy, and a high level of concentration. For example, writing an article or summarizing a book like this. We need more than 60 hours to read and understand the important content in a book. And we spend another 8 to 10 hours to write a 10-page summary article. If we close the door of the room, turn off the phone, and focus on writing it, then in 7 to 8 hours, we can definitely write a decent summary article. But if we sit down to write for not even 30 minutes and someone calls us to go down and pick up something we bought online, or we write a few lines and a colleague messages us to ask about work, then we can't really focus on writing the article or summary well.
The third step in managing time well is to know how to collect small pieces of time to do big tasks effectively. The third step in managing time well is to know how to collect small pieces of time to do big tasks. There are many ways to do this. For example, you can set aside a whole day to do small, miscellaneous tasks, tasks that take a short time to solve but you can get a lot done. By doing this, those small tasks won't bother you every day anymore.
Your working time is really important. If you don't know how to use it effectively, then you won't be able to accomplish any big, substantial tasks. Focus on doing one thing at a time during a certain period, and whatever is important and urgent should be done first. So how do you know which task is more urgent or more important? There are so many things to do, how should we prioritize them?
At this point, the author raised two techniques. First, don't let yourself be busy with work from yesterday. Some things, once you start doing them, you just want to get them done. Even though this thing is meaningless for our work, we can't just throw it away. For things like this, we must stop them immediately and be decisive. For example, some companies achieve success because of a certain product that is receiving strong support in the market. But that product can no longer meet the market demand. At that point, the company should not regret the old product, trying to create a market to promote an outdated product that has no demand anymore. Instead, you should have new innovations, research, and create new products.
Second, you should not prioritize work based on pressure. Sometimes, things with high pressure look very big, but they are not necessarily important. But some things that are important, we tend to overlook them. For example, thinking about the business strategy for your company. If we prioritize work in this way, we will definitely put this kind of important work last. We'll think about it a little later. We'll talk about it in a while. And we all know that if we use the word "wait," then we will never get it done.
The above is just one way that can make you become a leader with effectiveness, which is to know how to manage time correctly. To manage time well, you have to learn to record the things you have to do in a day, reduce any unnecessary things, and then gather small pieces of time to do one thing. At the same time, you have to know how to prioritize work, do what is important and urgent first, and don't do too many things at once.
Next, we come to the second important point, which is: a good manager knows how to use people according to their talents. We always want good people, talented people to work for us, such as having the ability to solve problems, having high creativity, having leadership qualities, being good at communication, having various other professional skills, and so on. A person who is good at everything is not easy to find.
In fact, in the job market, there are two other types of people: people with outstanding strengths and weaknesses, and people with ordinary abilities who are not outstanding in any particular area. Of these two groups of people, which one would you choose? In fact, everyone has their shortcomings. As a manager, you have to know how to use people according to the talents they have, as the Cambodian saying goes: "crooked wood is for making wheel hubs, straight wood is for making vehicles." A manager should not just look at the weaknesses of their staff. Instead, they should often ask themselves, "What can he do well?" The mission of a manager is not to change him, but to help him use his strengths to bring out his abilities to the maximum.
A brilliant manager not only knows how to use the people under his authority to work well, but also knows how to manage his superiors. Superiors or bosses are also human. They also have weaknesses. And knowing how to use your superiors to work for you can really facilitate your work as a manager a lot. If your boss is a good communicator, you can ask your boss to meet important clients with you. This makes it even more likely to succeed.
Finally, a manager must know themselves, know themselves well first before knowing others. Some people, when their work is not up to par, they like to complain and blame others, blame the company, blame the product. In fact, if you are a person who truly loves your work, loves the work you are doing, you will explore all means to make that work successful. Don't try to force yourself to do something you don't want to do. You should do something that matches your talents and your passions, then you will grow quickly.
The last important point in this book is that it teaches us to know how to make decisions correctly. We always think that a good manager probably needs to make many decisions every day. But in fact, a brilliant manager only makes decisions on big matters. But what is more important than this is the implementation of the work. If you spend all day just making decisions without any implementation, then you will still not get good results.
Moreover, some things do not require a decision to be made, because every decision has its risks. Sometimes, not making a decision is also a decision. But once a decision is made, you must do it well, do it to completion. You can't just make a decision and then have no action. Usually, a good decision is one that has gone through a fierce and tense debate.
If a strategy is just proposed and everyone immediately thinks it's good, without any discussion, without any debate, then it is not a decision with effectiveness. In this book, the author quoted the words of the CEO of General Electric, who said to the author, "I have only one request. I hope you can write down what you think is right. You don't have to worry about our opinions, and you don't have to worry whether we agree or not." The above words are truly what every manager should learn from.
The author also advised that for problems that occur repeatedly, you must find the root of the problem and formulate it into a procedure to solve the problem. Make it so that the staff can easily implement it without having to make too many decisions.