Every knowledge worker in modern organization is an “executive” if, by virtue of his position or knowledge, he is responsible for a contribution that materially affects the capacity of the organization to perform and to obtain results.
This may be the capacity of a business to bring out a new product or to obtain a larger share of a given market.
It may be the capacity of a hospital to provide bedside care to its patients, and so on.
Such a man (or woman) must make decisions; he cannot just carry out orders.
He must take responsibility for his contribution.
And he is supposed, by virtue of his knowledge, to be better equipped to make the right decision than anyone else.
He may be overridden; he may be demoted or fired.
But so long as he has the job the goals, the standards, and the contribution are in his keeping.
Most managers are executives—though not all.
But many nonmanagers are also becoming executives in modern society.
For the knowledge organization, as we have been learning these last few years, needs both “managers” and “individual professional contributors” in positions of responsibility, decision-making, and authority.
This fact is perhaps best illustrated by a recent newspaper interview with a young American infantry captain in the Vietnam jungle.
➤ Asked by the reporter, “How in this confused situation can you retain command?” the young captain said: “Around here, I am only the guy who is responsible.
If these men don’t know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I’m too far away to tell them.
My job is to make sure they know.
What they do depends on the situation which only they can judge.
The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.”
In a guerrilla war, every man is an “executive.”
There are many managers who are not executives.
Many people, in other words, are superiors of other people—and often of fairly large numbers of other people—and still do not seriously affect the ability of the organization to perform.
Most foremen in a manufacturing plant belong here.
They are “overseers” in the literal sense of the word.
They are “managers” in that they manage the work of others.
But they have neither the responsibility for, nor authority over, the direction, the content, and the quality of the work or the methods of its performance.
They can still be measured and appraised very largely in terms of efficiency and quality, and by the yardsticks we have developed to measure and appraise the work and performance of the manual worker.
Conversely, whether a knowledge worker is an executive does not depend on whether he manages people or not.
In one business, the market research man may have a staff of two hundred people, whereas the market research man of the closest competitor is all by himself and has only a secretary for his staff.
This should make little difference in the contribution expected of the two men.
It is an administrative detail.
Two hundred people, of course, can do a great deal more work than one man.
But it does not follow that they produce and contribute more.
Knowledge work is not defined by quantity.
Neither is knowledge work defined by its costs.
Knowledge work is defined by its results.
And for these, the size of the group and the magnitude of the managerial job are not even symptoms.
Having many people working in market research may endow the results with that increment of insight, imagination, and quality that gives a company the potential of rapid growth and success.
If so, two hundred men are cheap.
But it is just as likely that the manager will be overwhelmed by all the problems two hundred men bring to their work and cause through their interactions.
He may be so busy “managing” as to have no time for market research and for fundamental decisions.
He may be so busy checking figures that he never asks the question: ‘What do we really mean when we say “our market”?
And as a result, be may fail to notice significant changes in the market which eventually may cause the downfall of his company.
But the individual market researcher without a staff may be equally productive or unproductive.
He may be the source of the knowledge and vision that make his company prosper.
Or he may spend so much of his time hunting down details—the footnotes academicians so often mistake for research—as to see and hear nothing and to think even less.
Throughout every one of our knowledge organizations, we have people who manage no one and yet are executives.
Rarely indeed do we find a situation such as that in the Vietnam jungle, where at any moment, any member of the entire group may be called upon to make decisions with life-and-death impact for the whole.
But the chemist in the research laboratory who decides to follow one line of inquiry rather than another one may make the entrepreneurial decision that determines the future of his company.
He may be the research director.
But he also may be—and often is—a chemist with no managerial responsibilities, if not even a fairly junior man.
Similarly, the decision what to consider one “product” in the account books may be made by a senior vice-president in the company.*[1]
It may also be made by a junior.
And this holds true in all areas of today’s large organization.
I have called “executives” those knowledge workers, managers, or individual professionals who are expected by virtue of their position or their knowledge to make decisions in the normal course of their work that have significant impact on the performance and results of the whole.
They are by no means a majority of the knowledge workers.
For in knowledge work too, as in all other areas, there is unskilled work and routine.
But they are a much larger proportion of the total knowledge work force than any organization chart ever reveals.
This is beginning to be realized—as witness the many attempts to provide parallel ladders of recognition and reward for managers and for individual professional contributors. ŧ[2] What few yet realize, however, is how many people there are even in the most humdrum organization of today, whether business or government agency, research lab or hospital, who have to make decisions of significant and irreversible impact.
For the authority of knowledge is surely as legitimate as the authority of position.
These decisions, moreover, are of the same kind as the decisions of top management.
(This was the main point Mr. Kappel was making in the statement referred to above.)
The most subordinate manager, we now know, may do the same kind of work as the president of the company or the administrator of the government agency; that is, plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.
His compass may be quite limited, but within his sphere, he is an executive.
Similarly, every decision-maker does the same kind of work as the company president or the administrator.
His scope may be quite limited.
But he is an executive even if his function or his name appears neither on the organization chart nor in the internal telephone directory.
And whether chief executive or beginner, he needs to be effective.
Many of the examples used in this book are taken from the work and experience of chief executives—in government, army, hospitals, business, and so on.
The main reason is that these are accessible, are indeed often on the public record.
Also big things are more easily analyzed and seen than small ones.
But this book itself is not a book on what people at the top do or should do.
It is addressed to everyone who, as a knowledge worker, is responsible for actions and decisions which are meant to contribute to the performance capacity of his organization.
It is meant for every one of the men I call “executives.”
To be reasonably effective it is not enough for the individual to be intelligent, to work hard or to be knowledgeable.
Effectiveness is something separate, something different.
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Effectiveness can be learned—and it also has to be learned. continue
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The realities of the executive’s situation both demand effectiveness from him and make effectiveness exceedingly difficult to achieve.
Indeed, unless executives work at becoming effective, the realities of their situation will push them into futility.
Take a quick look at the realities of a knowledge worker outside an organization to see the problem.
A physician has by and large no problem of effectiveness.
The patient who walks into his office brings with him everything to make the physician’s knowledge effective.
During the time he is with the patient, the doctor can, as a rule, devote himself to the patient.
He can keep interruptions to a minimum.
The contribution the physician is expected to make is clear.
What is important, and what is not, is determined by whatever ails the patient.
The patient’s complaints establish the doctor’s priorities.
And the goal, the objective, is given: It is to restore the patient to health or at least to make him more comfortable.
Physicians are not noted for their capacity to organize themselves and their work.
But few of them have much trouble being effective.
The executive in organization is in an entirely different position.
In his situation there are four major realities over which he has essentially no control.
Every one of them is built into organization and into the executive’s day and work.
He has no choice but to “cooperate with the inevitable.”
But every one of these realities ↓ exerts pressure toward nonresults and nonperformance.
1. The executive’s time tends to belong to everybody else.
If one attempted to define an “executive” operationally (that is, through his activities) one would have to define him as a captive of the organization.
Everybody can move in on his time, and everybody does.
There seems to be very little any one executive can do about it.
He cannot, as a rule, like the physician, stick his head out the door and say to the nurse, “I won’t see anybody for the next half hour.”
Just at this moment, the executive’s telephone rings, and he has to speak to the company’s best customer or to a high official in the city administration or to his boss—and the next half hour is already gone. [1]
2. Executives are forced to keep on “operating” unless they take positive action to change the reality in which they live and work.
In the United States, the complaint is common that the company president—or any other senior officer—still continues to run marketing or the plant, even though he is now in charge of the whole business and should be giving his time to its direction.
This is sometimes blamed on the fact that American executives graduate, as a rule, out of functional work and operations, and cannot slough off the habits of a lifetime when they get into general management.
But exactly the same complaint can be heard in countries where the career ladder is quite different.
In the Germanic countries, for instance, a common route into top management has been from a central secretariat, where one works all along as a “generalist.”
Yet in German, Swedish, or Dutch companies top management people are criticized just as much for “operating” as in the United States.
Nor, when one looks at organizations, is this tendency confined to the top; it pervades the entire executive group.
There must be a reason for this tendency to “operate” other than career ladders or even the general perversity of human nature.
The fundamental problem is the reality around the executive.
Unless he changes it by deliberate action, the flow of events will determine what he is concerned with and what he does.
Depending on the flow of events is appropriate for the physician.
The doctor who looks up when a patient comes in and says: “Why are you here today?” expects the patient to tell him what is relevant.
When the patient says, “Doctor, I can’t sleep.
I haven’t been able to go to sleep the last three weeks,” he is telling the doctor what the priority area is.
Even if the doctor decides, upon closer examination, that the sleeplessness is a fairly minor symptom of a much more fundamental condition he will do something to help the patient to get a few good nights’ rest.
But events rarely tell the executive anything, let alone the real problem.
For the doctor, the patient’s complaint is central because it is central to the patient.
The executive is concerned with a much more complex universe.
What events are important and relevant and what events are merely distractions the events themselves do not indicate.
They are not even symptoms in the sense in which the patient’s narrative is a clue for the physician (continues following the sidebar ↓)
sidebar ↓
Dealing with risk and uncertainty ↑ ↓
People at each of these organizations ↑ ↓ think they are doing fine. They
act — mis-act — on this assumption …
larger view ↑
“Corporations once built to last like pyramids
are now more like tents.
Tomorrow they’re gone or in turmoil.”
HP 10+ years later
Only The Paranoid Survive
“The failure to understand the nature, function, and
purpose of business enterprise” Chapter 9, Management Revised Edition
“The customer never buys ↑ what you think you sell.
And you don’t know it.
That’s why it’s so difficult to differentiate yourself.” Druckerism
“People in any organization are always attached to the obsolete —
the things that should have worked but did not,
the things that once were productive and no longer are.” Druckerism
Conditions for survival
Going outside
Making the future — a chance for survival ↑
main brainroad continues ↓
If the executive lets the flow of events determine what he does, what he works on, and what he takes seriously, he will fritter himself away “operating.”
He may be an excellent man.
But he is certain to waste his knowledge and ability and to throw away what little effectiveness he might have achieved.
What the executive needs are criteria which enable him to work on the truly important, that is, on contributions and results, even though the criteria are not found in the flow of events.
3. The third reality pushing the executive toward ineffectiveness is that he is within an organization.
This means that he is effective only if and when other people make use of what he contributes.
Organization is a means of multiplying the strength of an individual.
It takes his knowledge and uses it as the resource, the motivation, and the vision of other knowledge workers.
Knowledge workers are rarely in phase with each other, precisely because they are knowledge workers.
Each has his own skill and his own concerns.
One man may be interested in tax accounting or in bacteriology, or in training and developing tomorrow’s key administrators in the city government.
But the fellow next door is interested in the finer points of cost accounting, in hospital economics, or in the legalities of the city charter.
Each has to be able to use what the other produces.
Usually the people who are most important to the effectiveness of an executive are not people over whom he has direct control.
They are people in other areas, people who in terms of organization, are “sideways.”
Or they are his superiors.
Unless the executive can reach these people, can make his contribution effective for them and in their work, he has no effectiveness at all.
4. Finally, the executive is within an organization.
Every executive, whether his organization is a business or a research laboratory, a government agency, a large university, or the air force, sees the inside—the organization—as close and immediate reality.
He sees the outside only through thick and distorting lenses, if at all.
What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand.
It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality.
But the organization is an abstraction.
Mathematically, it would have to be represented as a point—that is, as having neither size nor extension.
Even the largest organization is unreal compared to the reality of the environment in which it exists.
Specifically, there are no results within the organization.
All the results are on the outside.
The only business results, for instance, are produced by a customer who converts the costs and efforts of the business into revenues and profits through his willingness to exchange his purchasing power for the products or services of the business.
The customer may make his decisions as a consumer on the basis of market considerations of supply and demand, or as a socialist government which regulates supply and demand on the basis of essentially noneconomic value preferences.
In either case the decision-maker is outside rather than inside the business.
Similarly, a hospital has results only in respect to the patient.
But the patient is not a member of the hospital organization.
For the patient, the hospital is “real” only while he stays there.
His greatest desire is to go back to the “nonhospital” world as fast as possible.
What happens inside any organization is effort and cost.
To speak of “profit centers” in a business as we are wont to do is polite euphemism.
There are only effort centers.
The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job.
That it takes 100,000 employees to produce the automobiles or the steel the market wants is essentially a gross engineering imperfection.
The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment.
This outside, this environment which is the true reality, is well beyond effective control from the inside.
At the most, results are codetermined, as for instance in warfare, where the outcome is the result of the actions and decisions of both armies.
In a business, there can be attempts to mold the customers’ preferences and values through promotion and advertising.
Except in an extreme shortage situation such as a war economy, the customer still has the final word and the effective veto power (which explains why every Communist economy has run into trouble as soon as it moved beyond extreme shortages and long before it reached a position of adequate market supply in which the customer, rather than the political authorities, makes the real and final decisions).
But it is the inside of the organization that is most visible to the executive.
It is the inside that has immediacy for him.
Its relations and contacts, its problems and challenges, its crosscurrents and gossip reach him and touch him at every point.
Unless he makes special efforts to gain direct access to outside reality, he will become increasingly inside-focused.
The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside.
➤ An organization, a social artifact, is very different from a biological organism.
Yet it stands under the law that governs the structure and size of animals and plants: The surface goes up with the square of the radius, but the mass grows with the cube.
The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on.
Every part of an amoeba is in constant, direct contact with the environment.
It therefore needs no special organs to perceive its environment or to hold it together.
But a large and complex animal such as man needs a skeleton to hold it together.
It needs all kinds of specialized organs for ingestion and digestion, for respiration and exhalation, for carrying oxygen to the tissues, for reproduction, and so on.
Above all, a man needs a brain and a number of complex nervous systems.
Most of the mass of the amoeba is directly concerned with survival and procreation.
Most of the mass of the higher animal—its resources, its food, its energy supply, its tissues—serve to overcome and offset the complexity of the structure and the isolation from the outside.
An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species.
An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment.
And yet the bigger and apparently more successful an organization gets to be, the more will inside events tend to engage the interests, the energies, and the abilities of the executive to the exclusion of his real tasks and his real effectiveness in the outside.
This danger is being aggravated today by the advent of the computer and of the new information technology.
The computer—being a mechanical moron, can handle only quantifiable data.
These it can handle with speed, accuracy, and precision.
It will, therefore, grind out hitherto unobtainable quantified information in large volume.
One can, however, by and large quantify only what goes on inside an organization—costs and production figures, patient statistics in the hospital, or training reports.
The relevant outside events are rarely available in quantifiable form until it is much too late to do anything about them.
This is not because our information-gathering capacity in respect to the outside events lags behind the technical abilities of the computer.
If this were the only thing to worry about, we would just have to increase statistical efforts—and the computer itself could greatly help us to overcome this mechanical limitation.
The problem is rather that the important and relevant outside events are often qualitative and not capable of quantification.
They are not yet “facts.”
For a fact, after all, is an event which somebody has defined, has classified and, above all, has endowed with relevance.
To be able to quantify one has to have a concept first.
One first has to abstract from the infinite welter of phenomena a specific aspect which one then can name and finally count.
➤ The thalidomide tragedy which led to the birth of so many deformed babies is a case in point.
By the time doctors on the European continent had enough statistics to realize that the number of deformed babies born was significantly larger than normal—so much larger that there had to be a specific and new cause—the damage had been done.
In the United States, the damage was prevented because one public health physician perceived a qualitative change—a minor and by itself meaningless skin tingling caused by the drug—related it to a totally different event that had happened many years earlier, and sounded the alarm before thalidomide actually came into use.
The Ford Edsel holds a similar lesson.
All the quantitative figures that could possibly be obtained were gathered before the Edsel was launched.
All of them pointed to its being the right car for the right market.
The qualitative change—the shifting of American consumer-buying of automobiles from income-determined to taste-determined market-segmentation—no statistical study could possibly have shown.
By the time this could be captured in numbers, it was too late—the Edsel had been brought out and had failed.
The truly important events on the outside are not the trends.
They are changes in the trends.
These determine ultimately success or failure of an organization and its efforts.
Such changes, however, have to be perceived; they cannot be counted, defined, or classified.
The classifications still produce the expected figures—as they did for Edsel.
But the figures no longer correspond to actual behavior.
The computer is a logic machine, and that is its strength—but also its limitation.
The important events on the outside cannot be reported in the kind of form a computer (or any other logic system) could possibly handle.
Man, however, while not particularly logical is perceptive—and that is his strength.
The danger is that executives will become contemptuous of information and stimulus that cannot be reduced to computer logic and computer language.
Executives may become blind to everything that is perception (i. e., event) rather than fact (i. e., after the event).
The tremendous amount of computer information may thus shut out access to reality.
Eventually the computer—potentially by far the most useful management tool—should make executives aware of their insulation and free them for more time on the outside.
In the short run, however, there is danger of acute “computeritis.”
It is a serious affliction.
The computer only makes visible a condition that existed before it.
Executives of necessity live and work within an organization.
Unless they make conscious efforts to perceive the outside, the inside may blind them to the true reality. … going outside
These four realities the executive cannot change.
They are necessary conditions of his existence.
But he must therefore assume that he will be ineffectual unless he makes special efforts to learn to be effective.
[1] This comes out clearly in Sune Carlson’s Executive Behavior (Stockholm, Strombergs. 1951), the one study of top management in large corporations which actually recorded the time-use of senior executives.
Even the most effective executives in Professor Carlson’s study found most of their time taken up with the demands of others and for purposes which added little if anything to their effectiveness.
In fact, executives might well be defined as people who normally have no time of their own, because their time is always pre-empted by matters of importance to somebody else.
