Peter Drucker
Doing efficiently what should not be done
Effectiveness comes before efficiency
His 1963 Harvard Business Review article; The Effective Executive
He pulled apart two words that get used interchangeably. Why a gain in efficiency can conceal an error of direction.
What actually happened?
In the 1963 article he wrote the warning he is quoted for most: there is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all. Two words come apart. Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. One asks how, the other asks whether. With the direction wrong, efficiency is an amplifier, and speed only widens the gap. The Effective Executive is one long argument about choosing: concentrate on the few things that matter, and abandon, systematically, what yesterday's success left behind.
Improving efficiency keeps the wrong thing alive
Something that should not be done is easy to cut while it is slow and expensive, because everyone can see it. The moment somebody optimises it into something fast and cheap, it acquires a reason to survive: it runs so well, why kill it. The optimisation becomes its armour.
A weekly report nobody reads gets automated, and after that nobody proposes killing it. Its cost has fallen below the price of holding one meeting about it.
Whether comes before how
Most review agendas open on the details of the proposal, and should this exist at all gets skipped in silence, because it was approved once. The repair is a question in front of every routine: if we were starting today, would we begin this? A no voids the rest of the agenda.
He called it systematic abandonment. Walk the list of activities once a year asking whether you would enter this today. Most organisations never ask, and carry yesterday on their backs.
Busyness is the best disguise an effectiveness problem has
A person doing the wrong thing idly is found out quickly. A person doing the wrong thing at high speed reads to everybody, himself included, as valuable. So diagnose a team by the overlap between what it produces and what the customer needs, not by its efficiency numbers.
A department at full capacity all year, over target every quarter, finds at the year end that nothing it delivered appears in any customer's reason for buying.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: you are optimising a process and it is going well.
Ask first: if we were starting from zero today, would we do this at all? If not, what is this optimisation keeping alive?
Where it goes wrong: using the effectiveness point to dismiss all efficiency work. Once the direction is right, efficiency is the entire game. And asking the question daily rather than yearly means nothing ever accumulates.
Lines to keep
Nothing is so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done.
If we were not in this already, would we go into it now?
Same situation, other people are asking
The more rules I add, the more people route around them.Everyone is chasing the same thing. Where is nobody standing?Every hour is booked and one delay wrecks the week.The numbers look great. Is that skill or is it leverage?I'm managing it and it's getting worse · all 14 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.