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Why Executives Should Consider Being Coached

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  I once listened to a recorded practice session of Andrea Bocelli, the opera singer. At the time, he was not yet a superstar. He had just performed a pop song and they were listening to a recording of it. His manager, acting as his coach, suggested that he do it over. "What, it's not good enough?" Andrea asked. "It's perfect," said his coach. "But you can do it better." And he did. I learned a valuable lesson from that, and in the 1980s, during the quality improvement movement, Dr. Edwards Demming emphasized that you are either improving or dying. If you stand still, your competition will pass you and eventually you will die. And this is true even what you are currently doing is perfect, as was true of Bocelli's song. The value of being coached is that the coach will nudge you to always strive for bettering yourself. Successful people don't compare themselves to others. That can be truly intimidating because there will always be someone be
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Introducing The Effective Executive

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  Peter Drucker, considered by many to be the "father" of modern management, wrote extensively on the effective executive. The most fundamental and important point he made is that an executive needs first to be effective and second to be efficient.  As Drucker showed, effective means you are doing the right things, while efficient has to do with how well you are doing them. To dig the world's best hole is not useful if you didn't need a hole in the first place, a mistake that is sometimes made by all of us.  In time management, we have the grid that sorts tasks into urgent-not urgent and important-not important, and if we look at the four combinations, we find that it is tempting to focus on the things that seem urgent, even when they are unimportant. We would get more value from doing the urgent-important things first and waiting until later on the others. One of the services of an executive coach can be to help executives gain clarity on their priorities, based on t
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