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icon:: 📖 purchased:: Aug 13th, 2023 start:: Aug 13th, 2023 end:: Oct 30th, 2023 published:: length:: author:: @Peter Druker cover:: reading-time:: score:: - Meta - Ideas - Organization is effort center. Smaller the better. #smallorg collapsed:: true - Finally, the executive is within an organization. - He sees the outside only through thick and distorting lenses, if at all. What goes on outside is usually not even known firsthand. It is received through an organizational filter of reports, that is, in an already predigested and highly abstract form that imposes organizational criteria of relevance on the outside reality. - But the organization is an abstraction. Mathematically, it would have to be represented as a point—that is, as having neither size nor extension. - Specifically, there are no results within the organization. All the results are on the outside. - What happens inside any organization is effort and cost. To speak of “profit centers” in a business as we are wont to do is polite euphemism. There are only effort centers. The less an organization has to do to produce results, the better it does its job. That it takes 100,000 employees to produce the automobiles or the steel the market wants is essentially a **gross engineering imperfection**. The fewer people, the smaller, the less activity inside, the more nearly perfect is the organization in terms of its only reason for existence: the service to the environment. - Note: #vocabAcquired replace bad engineering with 'gross engineering imperfection' Compass was gross engineering imperfection incarnate - The larger the animal becomes, the more resources have to be devoted to the mass and to the internal tasks, to circulation and information, to the nervous system, and so on. - Every part of an amoeba is in constant, direct contact with the environment. It therefore needs no special organs to perceive its environment or to hold it together.Most of the mass of the higher animal—its resources, its food, its energy supply, its tissues—serves to overcome and offset the complexity of the structure and the isolation from the outside. - What Can I Contribute? - Posteriorities collapsed:: true - The only question is which will make the decision—the executive or the pressures. - setting “posteriorities”—that is, deciding what tasks not to tackle—and of sticking to the decision. - That one actually abandons what one postpones makes executives, however, shy from postponing anything altogether. What one has relegated may turn out to be the competitor’s triumph. #fomo - Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities: - Pick the future as against the past; - Focus on opportunity rather than on problem; - Choose your own direction—rather than climb on the bandwagon; and - Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is “safe” and easy to do. - achievement depends less on ability in doing research than on the courage to go after opportunity. - Concentration—that is, the courage to impose on time and events his own decision as to what really matters and comes first—is the executive’s only hope of becoming the master of time and events instead of their whipping boy. - - Events by themselves are not facts. - In physics the taste of a substance is not a fact. Nor, until fairly recently, was its color. In cooking, the taste is a fact of supreme importance, and in painting, the color matters. Physics, cooking, and painting consider different things as relevant and therefore consider different things to be facts. - - Highlights - Unless he makes special efforts to gain direct access to outside reality, he will become increasingly inside-focused. The higher up in the organization he goes, the more will his attention be drawn to problems and challenges of the inside rather than to events on the outside. #Compass - An organization is not, like an animal, an end in itself, and successful by the mere act of perpetuating the species. An organization is an organ of society and fulfills itself by the contribution it makes to the outside environment. Scope of Capitalism -