Preface

This book pays homage to a man I consider one of my chief mentors and kindred spirits, though I never actually had the pleasure of studying or working with him.

When I was a business student in the late 1980s, I fell in love with Peter F. Drucker’s book The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. It delivers a huge amount of useful, real-world information in fewer than two hundred pages. It’s still my favorite business book of all time, and I learn something new every time I read it.

Drucker published the first edition of The Effective Executive in 1967. While the book has weathered the years well, some of the concepts are a bit dated, particularly with today’s technology and social customs. Drucker doesn’t cover the electronics revolution that swept the business world in the 1980s, even in later editions; and in this book, executives are men and women are secretaries. I don’t believe he intended to be sexist, however, because the secretarial pool was the main foothold women had in business then.

Regardless, I believe the time is right to update Drucker’s concepts for the twenty-first century. Doing the Right Things Right: How the Effective Executive Spends Time focuses on time management strategies that today’s executives can use to quickly obtain profitable, productive results by managing the intersection of two critical dimensions: effectiveness and efficiency. The impact of technology plays an important part in the discussions outlined here, and that I have included gender equality goes without saying.

I don’t mean to replace Drucker’s work in any sense, nor could I. Let me emphasize that this is NOT an attempt to rewrite Drucker’s classic. However, I do hope that Doing the Right Things Right will stand as a companion to Drucker’s work, an addition that directly addresses how the role of the effective executive has changed in the almost half-century since Drucker penned the first edition of his groundbreaking book The Effective Executive.

I’m humbled by the opportunity to attempt it.