The Effective Executive

  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