Peter Drucker - Executivos Eficientes

okay ready to go I am Peter Ducker and I'm speaking from Claremont California all the management books and management magazine means are full of advice how to manage other people and yet you cannot hope to get performance out of other people unless you make yourself fully effective the emphasis on your Effectiveness and I will talk about the things we know that make an executive effective in whatever kind of organization they start out with looking at the Enterprise or which they are the executives and see what needs to be done let me see the most common

cause where Chief Executives whether in the presidency of a country or an arch dioces or in a business or in a hospital the first reason why they are not effective is said said do not ask that question and do not take it seriously they know what they want to do and so they start doing it and if history and he guide about nine out of 10 effective rulers in history Kings Emperor presidents changed what they were trying to do because they asked the question what needs to be done and that you always or almost always

turn out it is not what I want to do it's what the Enterprise needs and what would make a very real a very real difference and then they ask what are the things in that list of key results key performance where I can make the greatest contribution myself and they concentrate on them Executives in any organization large or small governmental business nonprofit all of them uh need to be seen as addressing them eles and working themselves on the key challenges and so the next step in being an effective executive is to think through so was

an enormous list of 40 people 40 things and nobody can do more than one or two at a time and so an effective executive sets priorities and sticks to them and so we can accomplish something the ones who are often very popular but leave nothing behind but chambles are the ones who run off in all directions and then effective people and not just effective executives know their strength you takes it for granted Biz artist but it is just the true a business exective was an employ so what are you strength and I'm always appalled at

how few people people know that in part because the schools are all remedial there you 8 years old supposed to learn the multiplication table and you're not very good at it and your teacher will never mention to your parents that you're excellent at writing excellent and Analysis all that third grade teacher will say is your child needs more work than arithmetic it's a very easy way to find out which is that every time you make a key decision such as putting a person into an important job or going into a new market or spending money

on research on the edges of knowledge you write down what you expect the results will be and then 9 months to a year later your feedback from your expectations to your results a very sobering exercise by the way I do it every summer now I've done it for 30 years and every summer I'm amazed not that the things I do well not it's the things I do badly but how little I really know about what I'm good at and that's been true of all people who follow that method it's a very old one we want

to know Spanish 13th century uh and within no time at all you'll know what you're good at and you know what additional skills and knowledge you need to acquire to get the full benefit from your strength and you know what to stop doing because it impairs your strength and you also know what you are not good at and most of us if you are any good are good at one thing competent onto others and no down good on the rest of everything and the effective executives place them themselves where what they're good at really makes

a difference and work at it you know all of you people by now know whether you're right-handed and left-handed 100 years ago as a result I I'm never really gotten a strong right hand but I don't have a developed left hand and now we let lefties develop their strengths but that isn't just true of byh handedness most of us are either readers or listeners very few do both equally well and if you're a reader you owe it to the people who work with you to tell them don't come in talking to me write out that

one or two page memo give me a chance to read it and then I'm ready to talk so find out whether you're a reader or a listener very few people are both and if your listener say to your Associates I am a listener present it to me first then leave the memo and if your reader say leave the memo here come back tomorrow and make it will triple your Effectiveness guaranteed because I've seen it to often but also some of us do their best work in the morning and we need to be undisturbed and your

predecessor was an evening person the way I am and I have learned to say that to the people who work with me including my clients and it perhaps accounts for the fact that at my age I'm still the most popular Management Consultant in the USA and there are a great many people I'm not one of them a great many people who but in order to get the most of a conversation a discussion take copious notes I don't write a word in a meeting afterwards I said down and write it down in a meeting I've learned

my the way I work is I listen carefully but I don't interrupt with no thinking and I have a very competent friend who the exact opposite know how you get results how you work and make make sure the people with whom you work know that and when you say to that associate of yours who was trained by your predecessor to write memoranda say Joe I want you to come in and speak first you may have to say it a few times and Joe will thank you for it so don't hesitate to tell people this is

how I work and you it's very easy to adapt oneself to somebody else's working misses it is almost impossible to change one's working missiles as you grow older the change but that but not deliberately change them yes one can learn to be punctual even in Brazil but beyond that don't change your habit it's not that easy and perhaps the final thing to say about your personal Effectiveness is organize your self-development I learned this many years ago from some of the most effective executives I worked with and again it's old this is pretty old once a

year here I sit down push everything else aside for two weeks I'll do it again this coming August and I sit down and look at the last year what did I really do well very often I callau up I had ask a client in fact this morning before I came sit for the camera I called up an Archbishop who is a client who inherited an American Arch that's in a terrible mess his PR here's a new man veryable and we have been now working for a year together to turn it around and I called him

up and said what did I do while working with you and he said you focused me in the development of my clergy which I had completely neglected and you did that very well we being very unpleasant about it by the way and so on what did I do do well what did I waste my time on partly because I'm look good at it partly because it was not really important it was just attractive and very often because I did not follow through business clients have concentrated on the outside the market the customer the non-customer and

I am going now the next year to concentrate very heavily on the inside uh the new labor force is emerging we have to learn a lot and this is what my clients need the most I also need it and so I'll change the assignments I think and the year from now I'll sit down and look at it again and anybody has ever done that and I told you this goes back hundreds of years has developed himself for herself yes maybe I've come to the conclusion I once taught statistics almost 60 years ago and I'm totally

obsolete in statistics they have changed so much I am going for a 3 months reading course in modern statistics I need it not because I am going to do statistical work but because I have to understand statistics and I no longer do real and this is self-development and so let me say in conclusion the first person and effective or an executive who wants to be effective has to make ex effective is executive himself or herself many years ago the one major diplom European diplomatist to for Saw World War I and was afraid of it was

the German ambassador to London and when he became dean of the Diplomatic core the dean ofoma gives an annual dinner to the King Edward now that's an extreme story but a usful look in the mirror and ask do I want to be the person I see do because that's what everybody else sees do I want to be seen as very clever but not very scrupulous do I want to be seen as a technician or do I want to be seen as a businessman a very important question with technology changing so fast and far too many

of my friends chief executive officers want to be seen as a technician where they should be running a business uh do do I want to be the person I see if not what do I have to change and those are the keys to making yourself an effective executive they all sound very simple but they are not easy and yet every single effective executive I worked with and have now worked with Executives for at least 60 years beginning with very big businesses and only in the last 30 years have I taken on small businesses and non

for-profit organizations so I've seen a lot of executives not very many bluntly were effective they were all bright people hardworking people very hardworking lazy Executives don't last long in the competitive economy and not very many got the right things done and the reason was always the same they asked what do I want to do and not what needs to be done they didn't set priorities and stuck to them they didn't check back on their results by definition Executives work in an organization and we really have barely learned to walk we still toddlers in organizations large

organizations are not much more than 100 years old and we are slow learners but we know enough to see what an executive has to do and has to stop doing if he or she wants to be effective executives in an organization and perhaps the first thing to say is that they have to make themselves under you know we still take if you look at today's organization business Hospital University government uh know two people have the same background basically and you can no longer take for granted that they understand what their neighbor is doing or that

they have been on that job here is the head of market research and you may have come out of the advertising agency and he have never done any selling or any pricing or a customer service and yet he's he's now accountable for and so in an organization Executives have to take responsibility that they being understood information or data that have been converted that have relevance that that are it cause us to act what do I need the management information person cannot tell you just as the telephone operator cannot tell you whom to call and then

when asks what information do I owe to whom and incidentally it's a good idea when you have Sal this through to go to that person and say H or Maria am I right this is the information you need to get from me and you be surprised how often the answer is we're not really quite almost because we no longer have have to have been on the jobs these people are doing we mean they haven't done them we may have read a book or two or taken a course or two that's not quite the same thing

as doing them and so the first key to Effectiveness is that your Associates understand you and you understand them that's also the secret of team building by the way of which you hear a great deal today and I have been preaching teams for 40 years and very few teams what are we trying to accomplish and to make sure that the whole organization understands it that's one of the key jobs of the CEO and in successful organization they never stop because basically you can't supervise people all the time most of the time they have to do

their own work themselves and if they do not know how to fit it towards the goals of the organization it won't fit but that's for the top people in the organization or but for everybody who runs a department when I first sit down with such people I said try to explain to me what you in customer service are trying to do and most of the time they haven't thought it through and then they complain that their Associates in the field to a job no they have only themselves to blame they if the person at the

top hasn't thought it through nobody in the group will understand it and do it so this may be the first thing to see we haven't had organizations traditionally people and the modern organization now things aren't that clear also they change and if the parish priest in the traditional Church yes a new one came in every 25 years but it did exactly what the old one had done and had exactly the same road it may have done it better or worse but it did the same things and today you are in that bank and you start

managing foreign exchange for your customers and your people haven't done it before your clients don't understand it you have to be clear about the mission and what are results and that's the first key and organization is only as strong as its people and no organization except very small ones can really hope to have a large number of exceptional people once you are above I would say 100 150 employees uh the law of Statistics more or less command that you have the normal mixture of the human race maybe you can eliminate the worst Misfits but that's

about it are not place people where their strength can produce look at people people and their performance what have they done well and try to get them into a position where what they can do has results very few Executives even in large organization realize that they control the organizations through people decisions so spend time on people decisions we know how to make them one looks at the assignment before one looks at people and one looks at the performance of a number of people and this is particularly important in the family company and in every country

there are 20 family companies for one that is publicly owned only they don't make the headlines so the outside always knows the big companies in Brazil or in the US or in Argentina and he doesn't know the smaller and still mostly family run companies and family companies come to grief because they run the business for the family and the family company the family has to be run for the business and so it is cheaper to pay that incompetent nephew of your wife not to come to work and to give him a job after that that's

a very important thing to know for the executive in family companies he has to forget that this person is family he has to look at the assignment and at the strength of people and match the to and then it becomes not necessarily irrelevant but of secondary importance that this person is family and this one is not their job up comes first or the family company won't survive and to Be an Effective executive in an organization you have to learn to be able to play two different roles there's a great deal of talk today maybe yesterday

is already over it about our moving out of the command and control organization yes and no there more knowledge workers you have in your organization the less you can command when the ship go or you have debated for a year and a half whether you go into a new product line different technology probably different markets and on the other hand your old business is clearly going down you need to go into a new one and and for a year and a half you have made studies and written papers and had staff conferences and then comes

the point where somebody makes a decision and says this is it I had to learn to be a partner it came very hard to me and I had to learn to be very decisive and that came easy to me I am not by Nature permiss but I had to learn to balance and those are the things to say there's a great deal of talk today about walking around yes it helps to get out of the office and walk around but more important is being outside where the market is customers the non-customers where the changes are

and to be effective in an organization you also have to be sense organs and that means you have to walk around inside and maybe sit down with the people in your lab I think it's important to ask what can an executive do today to prepare himself or herself to be effective tomorrow one of the things we know is that the next I don't know how many years but long years will be turbulent years because the speed of change is so great whether so you can predict that in the developed countries demographics will become a major

issue and uh yes in developed countries but even perhaps not yet in emerging countries uh we will have to learn to work with people very much older than we used to work with because the idea in even in the US that you can retire at 65 is no longer tenable and that's a major change but also the business Enterprise has come to play a quite a new role economically the world is becoming increasingly integrated politically it's becoming oh in increasingly splintered and the business Enterprise is very much in the middle one of the major mistakes

of my professional life is that I invented the term profit Center there is no such thing inside a business there are only cost centers the only profit Center is a customer whose check hasn't bounced and we know nothing about the outside the retail people know more than anybody else because when that housewife pays at a checkout counter there a record when you I work a lot with hospitals it is very hard to figure out the outside let alone results when you make a part to be assembled by one of your customers you may know a

lot about that customer but you know almost nothing about his customers and yet his customers are your ultimate customers because if that c Direct Customer viewers can't sell his automobile manufacturers you don't get an order either and so one of the important tasks for the executive head is to try to obtain more knowledge about the outside both geographically and topically and uh I'm always being asked by clients what do I do and I learned that from an old client of mine who built a very successful company before he died much too young he was barely

60 he made it a and that built his company this was in the health care field and 10 years before anybody else he realized the changes in both American Canadian and Japanese Healthcare and directed his company hospital supply business towards their new customers and he had a 10-year advantage and so obtaining knowledge about the outside and that means not just your customers but your non-customers in every business except the Government monopoly there are more people who don't buy your product or your service than people who buy it nobody has more 50% of the market is

very rare leading companies typically have about 24% of their abouts so 75% of the people who could be your customers who might be your customers are not why not and so the outside is something in which not that anybody can tell you executive yet how to acquire that but that's why uh now when I sit down with the executives I say what magazines do you read what books do you read and see you are learning more and more about less and less and and yet you are not in the electronics business but the whole industry

is going there so you better start subscribing to good to good Electronics magazines you know nothing about you a technical person you you better read a good management magazine so that you get a glimpse of outside and that is becoming more and more important but also realize that we are building organizations around knowledge now and knowledge is a very peculiar resource all older resources changed very very little my name is a Dutch name it means printer and my ancestor were printers in Amsterdam for 250 years they began shortly after printing was invented 50 years later

lasted till the end of the 18th century and during the the entire almost three centuries they did not have to learn anything new that skill did not change and today and so you to prepare yourself for the future better learn to build continous learning into your own life it may be going to a management meeting and listen to an expert it may be reading this book certainly magazines it may be even going back to the university uh for an advanced management program but build that stimulation that you realize how much is going on a good

deal of it will not affect you and your business but quite a bit will and if you then are overtaken by it in the last 40 years more old companies have been put out of business by arrivals of whose very existence it didn't even know than in any time in history because a competition now comes you are in pharmaceutical the competition comes from genetics and biom Medicine of which you know nothing you are in the telephone business and in this country the internet is becoming a very serious competitor the younger people don't use a telephone

and for the first time since the telephone was invented telephone use and telephone subscription go down quite fast and those people in their telephone companies had never heard of the internet that was not the our our business our voice Communications either via cable or via satellite and the younger people don't use the telephone they use the internet electronic mail and so you better know what goes on and perhaps one final important cave least important to you in in La Latin America because your old hands you have learned the hard way to manage your currency exposure

in countries with buil-in inflation you learn that though if you don't mind my saying that you are not necessarily very good at it and that's is what currencies are and accept the fact that this isn't going to change as all of you know the Europeans have not really been able to get one currency because no one country was willing to give up its fiscal Independence and that's not going to change for a long time and yet more and more businesses are exposed either as buyers or as sellers or very often as debors or creditors and

so managing currencies is becoming an important task it's got to be done for the entire Enterprise in one place uh that's one reason where even their most decentralized multinational company is Thoroughly centralized in currency management and it's got to be taken seriously because overnight a currency devalues and you lose more than you can possibly earn during your years honest hard work making your product or delivering your service and so currency management well we know quite a bit not nearly enough but quite a bit is one of the things an executive has to learn to be

prepared for the future but above all he has to be prepared or she for Change and so you also have to learn how one introduces change one doesn't do it the way most of us do it and most governments do it a change for the whole country overnight never works think through the new policies the new product the new service find somebody in your company who really believes in it who wants it on one condition that this person also enjoys the respect of your organization and then let him or her pilot it first everything new

has to be changed everything you gets into trouble and then you need somebody who is the champion who's committed to it but you also need to do it where if it goes wrong it doesn't kill your company and it better be somebody who is respected in the organization so that people say I still don't understand that but it works for your and I've learned sure has results for 10 years he has performed I respect him and if he says try it it works I'll do it so you will learn to build the management of change

into your organization but also into your life because one one thing is predictable that the period of turbulence and change is not over only 40 years ago 30 years ago the most intelligent man in management was a Japanese kenich my predicted that only the developed countries matter he calls them the Triad in the last 20 years the developed countries have not done very well Us best of all then Japan Europe has done very badly and yet World production has grown faster than ever before and World Trade even faster because the Pacific Rim countries and some

countries in Latin America didn't even notice that Japan was in deep depression Europe didn't move and the US was very uneven there is no more key currency there is no more key country development can happen any place and that makes for a very turbulent thing and and so one cannot predict the future but one can prepare for it and again this is Peter drer speaking in clont California