First Things First
PETER F. DRUCKER
"Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time"
If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration.
Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time.
The need to concentrate is grounded both in the nature of the executive job and in the nature of man. Several reasons for this should already be apparent: There are always more important contributions to be made than there is time available to make them. Any analysis of executive contributions comes up with an embarrassing richness of important tasks; any analysis of executives’ time discloses an embarrassing scarcity of time available for the work that really contributes. No matter how well an executive manages his time, the greater part of it will still not be his own. Therefore, there is always a time deficit.
The more an executive focuses on upward contribution, the more will he require fairly big continuous chunks of time. The more he switches from being busy to achieving results, the more will he shift to sustained efforts—efforts which require a fairly big quantum of time to bear fruit. Yet to get even that half-day or those two weeks of really productive time requires self-discipline and an iron determination to say “no”.
![Executive working at desk](http://www.mlaacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IND-005-002B.jpg)
Similarly, the more an executive works at making strengths productive, the more will he become conscious of the need to concentrate the human strengths available to him on major opportunities. This is the only way to get results.
But concentration is dictated also by the fact that most of us find it hard enough to do well even one thing at a time, let alone two. Mankind is indeed capable of doing an amazingly wide diversity of things; humanity is a “multipurpose tool.” But the way to apply productively mankind’s great range is to bring to bear a large number of individual capabilities on one task. It is concentration in which all faculties are focused on one achievement.
![IND-005-002C](http://www.mlaacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IND-005-002C.jpg)
We rightly consider keeping many balls in the air a circus stunt. Yet even the juggler does it only for ten minutes or so. If he were to try doing it longer, he would soon drop all the balls.
People do, of course, differ. Some do their best work when doing two tasks in parallel at the same time, thus providing a change of pace. This presupposes however that they give each of the two tasks the minimum quantum needed to get anything done. But few people, I think, can perform with excellence three major tasks simultaneously.
There was Mozart, of course. He could, it seems, work on several compositions at the same time, all of them master-pieces. But he is the only known exception. The other prolific composers of the first rank—Bach, for instance, Handel, or Haydn, or Verdi—composed one work at a time. They did not begin the next until they had finished the preceding one, or until they had stopped work on it for the time being and put it away in the drawer. Executives can hardly assume that they are “executive Mozarts.”
![old music book](http://www.mlaacademy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IND-005-002D.jpg)
Concentration is necessary precisely because the executive faces so many tasks clamoring to be done. For doing one thing at a time means doing it fast. The more one can concentrate time, effort, and resources, the greater the number and diversity of tasks one can actually perform.
No chief executive of any business I have ever known accomplished as much as the recently retired head of a pharmaceutical firm. When he took over, the company was small and operated in one country only. When he retired eleven years later, the company had become a worldwide leader.
This man worked for the first years exclusively on research direction, research program, and research personnel. The organization had never been a leader in research and had usually been tardy even as a follower. The new chief executive was not a scientist. But he realized that the company had to stop doing five years later what the leaders had pioneered five years before. It had to decide on its own direction. As a result, it moved within five years into a leadership position in two new important fields.
The chief executive then turned to building an international company—years after the leaders, such as the old Swiss pharmaceutical houses, had established themselves as leaders all over the world. Carefully analyzing drug consumption, he concluded that health insurance and government health services act as the main stimuli to drug demand. By timing his entry into a new country to coincide with a major expansion of its health services he managed to start big in countries where his company had never been before, and without having to take away markets from the well-entrenched international drug firms.
The last five years of his tenure he concentrated on working out the strategy appropriate to the nature of modern health care, which is fast becoming a “public utility” in which public bodies such as governments, nonprofit hospitals, and semipublic agencies (such as Blue Cross in the United States) pay the bills, although an individual, the physician, decides on the actual purchase. Whether his strategy will work out, it is too early to say—it was only perfected in 1965, shortly before he retired. But his is the only one of the major drug companies that, to my knowledge, has even thought about strategy, pricing, marketing, and the relationships of the industry worldwide.
It is unusual for any one chief executive to do one task of such magnitude during his entire tenure. Yet this man did three—in addition to building a strong, well-staffed, world-wide organization. He did this by single-minded concentration on one task at a time.
This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.
The people who get nothing done often work a great deal harder. In the first place, they underestimate the time for any one task. They always expect that everything will go right. Yet, as every executive knows, nothing ever goes right. The unexpected always happens—the unexpected is indeed the only thing one can confidently expect. And almost never is it a pleas-ant surprise. Effective executives therefore allow a fair margin of time beyond what is actually needed. In the second place, the typical (that is, the more or less ineffectual) executive tries to hurry—and that only puts him further behind. Effective executives do not race. They set an easy pace but keep going steadily. Finally, the typical executive tries to do several things at once. Therefore, he never has the minimum time quantum for any of the tasks in his program. If any one of them runs into trouble, his entire program collapses.
Effective executives know that they have to get many things done—and done effectively. Therefore, they concentrate—their own time and energy as well as that of their organization—on doing one thing at a time, and on doing first things first.
Adapted from “The Effective Executive”, P.104-117