This week I’m writing from the beaches of Cantabria, where my children are building sand castles and running into the Atlantic while I read in the cool, teal-filtered light of the Neso tent my wife talked me into buying a few years ago (she was right). I’m trading my usual organizational design deep dives for something a bit more foundational—finally reading Peter Drucker’s “The Effective Executive”—and I’m genuinely irritated. Not by the book, by the fact that we’re still fighting battles Drucker won in 1966.
The man literally figured out knowledge work six decades ago. Everything I write about—autonomous teams, outcome-focused leadership, distributed decision-making—it’s all right here. And yet executives today act like these concepts are revolutionary startup nonsense.
What Drucker got that we keep forgetting
Drucker’s core insight feels almost absurd in its simplicity: “The executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done.” Not manage people. Not optimize processes. Get the right things done. That’s it.
But here’s what floored me while reading on the beach: Drucker defined “executive” as anyone who makes decisions that affect organizational performance. Engineers deciding technical architecture? Executives. Product managers choosing features? Executives. Data scientists building models? All executives.
This isn’t just semantic hair-splitting. Drucker understood that knowledge work is fundamentally different from manual work. Knowledge workers direct themselves. They can’t be supervised in the traditional sense because their value comes from thinking, not following instructions.
Sound familiar? It should. This is exactly what we mean when we talk about empowered teams and autonomous decision-making. Drucker called it Tuesday in 1966.
The time trap we still can’t escape
Chapter 2 hit me like one of the cold Atlantic waves. Drucker writes: “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” He then describes executives who think they know where their time goes but are completely wrong when they actually track it.
Sitting here with my phone face-down and Slack notifications disabled, I realized I fall into this trap constantly. We all do. We think we’re doing strategic work when we’re actually drowning in reactive busywork. Drucker’s solution is deceptively simple: record where your time actually goes, eliminate the waste, and focus on what only you can do.
This isn’t productivity porn. It’s the foundation of effective leadership. Yet most leaders I know couldn’t tell you how they spent last Tuesday if their life depended on it.
The contribution mindset that changes everything
Here’s where Drucker gets really dangerous. He argues that effective executives focus outward on contribution, not inward on their own efforts. They ask “What can I contribute?” instead of “What’s in it for me?”
This flips traditional management thinking upside down. Instead of climbing hierarchies and accumulating power, effective executives think about what they can give. This naturally leads to better decisions because you’re thinking about impact, not politics.
Every fluid organization I’ve worked with operates exactly this way. People join mission teams based on what they can contribute, not what they can extract. Teams form around customer problems, not career advancement. It works because contribution thinking scales better than self-interest.
Drucker figured this out when Kennedy was president. We’re still catching up.
Building on strengths (but evolving beyond specialists)
The most counterintuitive chapter covers making strengths productive. Drucker argues that you can’t build performance on weaknesses. The executive’s job is to make people’s strengths effective and their weaknesses irrelevant.
This directly contradicts most performance management approaches, which obsess over development areas and skill gaps. Drucker says that’s backwards. Find what people do exceptionally well, then design roles around those strengths.
This is where I respectfully push back on Drucker, if only to adjust for today’s AI-accelerated, VUCA world. While his premise about cross-functional teams of people with exceptional strengths remains solid, a team of pure specialists won’t cut it anymore. With AI agents taking over routine work and smaller teams becoming the norm, we need M-shaped people: those with deep expertise in multiple domains plus broad capabilities across others.
I’ve seen this evolution across my career. The most effective teams today have people who are exceptional at two or three things and competent across many more. A data scientist who deeply understands both machine learning and product strategy outperforms one who only knows algorithms. An engineer who masters both backend systems and customer research can navigate complexity that pure specialists can’t touch.
The magic still happens when you build around strengths. But in a world where change comes fast and teams stay small, collaborative teams of M-shaped experts consistently outperform collaborative teams of specialists. Drucker got the foundation right—we just need to build higher on it.
Decisions without drama
Drucker’s approach to decision-making would eliminate 90% of the meetings happening right now. He distinguishes between decisions that require judgment and those that can be handled by existing policies. Most “decisions” aren’t actually decisions—they’re execution of established principles.
Real decisions happen when you’re dealing with unprecedented situations or fundamental trade-offs. These require systematic analysis, not committee consensus. Drucker provides a framework that’s shockingly simple: understand the problem, develop alternatives, make the call, implement with conviction.
No decision paralysis. No endless alignment meetings. Just clarity about what actually requires executive attention and what doesn’t.
Why we keep ignoring the playbook
Reading this on vacation, away from the usual chaos, it’s crystal clear why these ideas haven’t taken hold. They require leaders to actually lead instead of manage. They demand focus instead of reactive firefighting. They prioritize effectiveness over activity.
Most organizations can’t handle this level of clarity. It’s easier to stay busy than to get the right things done. It’s more comfortable to manage people than to make hard decisions. It’s safer to fix weaknesses than to bet everything on strengths.
The crazy part is that every successful organizational transformation I’ve seen—from FAST teams to Operations Squads to shared consciousness—follows Drucker’s principles. We just dress them up in modern language and pretend we invented something new.
The beach reading test
If you’re a leader and you haven’t read “The Effective Executive,” stop whatever you’re doing and get a copy. If you have read it, read it again. Pay attention to how much of your current approach contradicts Drucker’s framework.
The book is short, practical, and completely timeless. Most importantly, it’s a reality check. Are you actually being effective, or are you just staying busy? Are you getting the right things done, or are you optimizing the wrong metrics?
I’m back to normal programming next week with more thoughts on organizational design, adaptive leadership, and technology . But this quick beach read reminded me that sometimes the most revolutionary ideas are the ones we’ve been ignoring for 60 years.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go help my son build a moat for his castle and some serious thinking to do about how much time I actually spend on what matters.
Drucker would approve of both.