The Effective Executive

“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.”  – Peter F. Drucker

Lessons learned: Time is our most limited resource. Search for strength, not the absence of weakness. Do the first things first.

To become an effective executive one has to look no further, The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker is a timeless masterpiece that perfectly describes the key components to becoming an effective executive. The first lesson may be the most important, that anyone can become an effective executive. Becoming one is not reserved for the few people who seem to have a tendency to lead, it is a skill that can be learned to anyone willing to learn it. Throughout his seminal book, Drucker uses plain language and simple & elegant rules of thumb to learn these skills to you – the reader. He ends the book with the conclusion that everyone should learn effectiveness, the book is highly recommended.

After explaining why effectiveness can be learned (and stating that it has little to do with intelligence or knowledge), the book focuses on time. Here Drucker proposes three steps to effective time management:

1. Record time
2. Manage time
3. Consolidate time

The first states that we should record our time (or let your secretary do it for you). You will be surprised to find out where you are spending your time and how much of your agenda is dictated by others. Time is our most unique resource and managing it is, therefore, the second step. Think of where you can best spend your time (urgency versus importance – Eisenhower Matrix) and which activities you can best eliminate. Step three is to consolidate time, to set aside large, continuous, and uninterrupted units of time. This allows you to study a problem, to go through a large document, to work on a presentation – i.e. to really think! Using these three steps you can make sure that every minute counts!

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter F. Drucker

Latter chapters are concerned with contributing to the right things. The first question you need to ask yourself is “Where can I contribute?”, where it is that you can be the most effective. In working with other people you have to ask where they can best contribute, i.e. “What are my colleagues’ strengths?”. In the fifth chapter Drucker explains a lesson (repeated endlessly by management guru’s and alike), to put the first things first. As an executive you will be asked to make decisions, this is, in essence, the thing that separates you from ‘non-executives’. The book offers you five elements of effective decision making:

1. See that the problem is generic and can be solved by a principle
2. Defining the specifications the problem needs to satisfy, the boundary conditions
3. Before thinking about compromises, adaptations, etc., think first of what is right
4. Build into the decision the actions needed to carry it out
5. Test the validity and effectiveness of the decision with feedback

After reading The Effective Executive you should be convinced that effectiveness can be learned. Although the lessons are simple and the examples seem to speak for themselves, applying them will prove to be difficult. This is not because of any hidden complexity, it is because of the ‘lazy’ nature of us humans. Recording your time is as easy as it gets, sticking to it for months and analysing it, very difficult to maintain (see Triggers). Whilst The Effective Executive lacks advice in this area (try The Power of Habit) it does deliver what it promises. If you are serious about becoming an effective executive, this should be next on your list!

The Book:

The Effective Executive – Peter F. Drucker – ISBN-10: 0060833459 – ISBN-13: 978-0060833459

More on The Effective Executive

http://www.enlight8.com/8-lessons-on-effectiveness-from-peter-druckers-effective-executive/ – Lessons from The Effective Executive

http://hbr.org/2004/06/what-makes-an-effective-executive/ar/1 – HBR article by Peter F. Drucker

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/46992-the-effective-executive-the-definitive-guide-to-getting-the-right-thing – Quotes from The Effective Executive

Being Mortal

Atul Gawande once again uses his skill to beautifully explain and improve the world around us. This time it isn’t checklists, it’s about the process of the end of our lives. He combines stories of his family and patients, together with sweeping insights and critiques of our current medical system. Here are my thoughts:

• People who age want to age well, not only keep their health. But the latter is what our systems are built for, and although that is good, it forgets that older people are … well … people. And they want to be treated that way, not only as a body that needs to be kept alive. So talk about living, not focus only on dying.
• Stories of defiance and staying in control of their journey (and story) is what resonates with many older people. This should give us pause and consider what would be best for them (and us later on). Maybe that is not keeping us alive with tubes to the end. Maybe that is living a good life until the end.
• This also means that less medicine may be a better solution for many. More medicine, in most cases, doesn’t correlate with more healthy days/years.
• And discussing death (or end of life) is one of the best ways to improve that time on earth. In other words, when talking seriously about this, you can’t (always, but sometimes) expect to live longer, but the last years will be happier and more meaningful.
• For doctors, the incentives are also sometimes wrong. They get paid for doing surgery, not for talking with patients. I hope that with the coming age of AI, we will make more time and room for these talks as machines take over more and more of the cutting work.

• There is a tension between autonomy and safety. As children of ageing parents, you want safety (like you would want for your child), but (like your children) your parents want autonomy. We’re asking ourselves ‘Is this a place where I would leave mom and feel good about it? (safety)’ instead of ‘Is this a place where mom would be happy? (autonomy)’. This reminds me of the book Drive, where the three motivations of humans are laid out: autonomy, mastery, purpose.
• The need for safety comes from a good place. It’s love and dedication. But that is just what can get in the way of letting someone live a life worth living (even if that is a bit more dangerous).
• People want/need a purpose to live. Gawande also calls this loyalty or transcendence (also coined as an extra layer on top of Maslov’s pyramid). It’s caring for something bigger than yourself, for the future, for others.
• One way this is encouraged is with animals and plants. In a few different experiments, time and time again they show that bringing in animals has a positive effect on the lives of the elderly residents. It also lowers medicine use (by more than half) and anecdotal evidence even indicated that it helped people go back to unassisted living.

• Another interesting point in the book is the behaviour of doctors. Gawande speaks of their optimism and hope they provide for their patients. But in many cases, this is just a way to not have the hard conversations. It’s recommending that people do another experimental treatment that will only cause extra suffering for that 1% chance that it prolongs their life.
• This problem is even worse with patients they know better. The doctors are misleading themselves and their patients. Discussing a fantasy is easier than having the hard conversation. Gawande argues that we should all have those hard conversations, probably earlier than we want!

• Being mortal takes courage. Courage on two levels. It’s about getting the knowledge, confronting yourself with the facts. And to act on that knowledge.
• That is the power of hard conversations.

• We evaluate our experiences on two levels. One level is the experiencing self. The other level is the remembering self.
• The second ones only remembers the peak and the end (the peak-end rule).
• The way we remember is therefore vastly different from the way we experience life.
• This ties in to the great book, Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.”

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tWagD0cOIY

New York Time review: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/books/review/atul-gawande-being-mortal-review.html

The Quark and the Jaguar

TBD

Deep Simplicity

Summary: explaining difficult concepts in an easy way. Great source of information. Underlying of big things are simple algorithms

Over the past two decades, no field of scientific inquiry has had a more striking impact across a wide array of disciplines–from biology to physics, computing to meteorology–than that known as chaos and complexity, the study of complex systems. Now astrophysicist John Gribbin draws on his expertise to explore, in prose that communicates not only the wonder but the substance of cutting-edge science, the principles behind chaos and complexity. He reveals the remarkable ways these two revolutionary theories have been applied over the last twenty years to explain all sorts of phenomena–from weather patterns to mass extinctions.

Grounding these paradigm-shifting ideas in their historical context, Gribbin also traces their development from Newton to Darwin to Lorenz, Prigogine, and Lovelock, demonstrating how–far from overturning all that has gone before–chaos and complexity are the triumphant extensions of simple scientific laws. Ultimately, Gribbin illustrates how chaos and complexity permeate the universe on every scale, governing the evolution of life and galaxies alike.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat

“An exhaustively researched treatise on the four pillars of successful cooking.” (New York Times Book Review)

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is a book about the elements of good cooking. The book teaches the fundamentals, which you can use later in all your cooking. So, throw out the recipes and become a chef yourself. That is the bold claim, and I think Samin follows through. Here are my notes on the book.

Salt

• Tasting is one of the most important things you’re doing in the kitchen
• Salt can help prevent dishes from becoming flat
• Salt can be administered as …uhh… salt, cheese, olives, capers, etc
• Salt is a mineral: sodium chloride (one of the essential ones we can’t live without)
• All salt is from the sea (rock salt is just that from ancient lakes, which lay under the ground nowadays)
• The primary role salt plays in cooking is t amplify the flavour
• With home-cooked meals, don’t worry about adding too much (unless otherwise indicated by your doctor)
• Salt has its own taste and enhances the flavour of other ingredients
• Different types of salt:
  • Table salt: very dense, probably with iodine (which is good but gives metallic taste)
  • Kosher salt: very pure salt, that comes in different sizes
  • Sea salt: use the expensive kind (fleur de sel) only when the flavour will pop out

• We can perceive 5 tastes: saltiness, sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and umami (savouriness)
• Aroma is what our nose perceives (thousands of chemicals)
• Flavour lies on the intersection of taste, aroma, and sensory elements like texture, sound, appearance, and temperature
• Salt affects both taste and flavour
• Anything that heightens flavour is a seasoning
  • Season (salt) food from within

• Salt reduces our perception of bitterness (even better than sugar does)
• Salt enhances sweetness

• Salt moves through food via osmosis and diffusion
  • Osmosis: the movement of water in and out of a cell wall (towards the saltier side)
  • Diffusion: the movement of salt through a cell wall until it’s evenly distributed (this is a slower process)
• Salt meats in advance, to give it plenty of time to diffuse
• Salt seafood only 15 minutes before prepping
• Salt doesn’t dissolve in fat, but luckily most fats contain some water
• Add a pinch of salt to eggs you will scramble, etc
  • Lightly season water for poaching eggs
  • Season eggs cooked in the shell or fried in a pan just before serving
• Salt assists in weakening pectin (an undigestible carbohydrate) in vegetables
  • (in general) Salt vegetables before cooking them
  • Toss vegetables with salt and olive oil before roasting
  • Salt blancing water generously before adding vegetables
  • Add salt into the pan for sautéing
  • Season vegetables with large, watery, cells (e.g. tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines) 15 minutes before grilling/roasting
  • Salt mushrooms only when they are already starting to become brown
• Salt legumes and beans when you soak or cook them
• Salt bread dough early (it’s low in water, so it dissolves slowly)

• When cooking food in water, add enough salt
  • Because of the need for equilibrium, nutrients will stay in the greens
  • This will enhance flavour (duh) and make greens look greener
  • It also allows for quicker cooking (weakened pectins)
  • Salt water for cooking so that it tastes like sea water (i.e. a lot)
  • Taste the water to make sure it’s highly seasoned before you add any food
  • Cooking food in salted water is one of the simplest ways to season from within
• Measuring salt is done by taste
  • And with experience
  • And probably more than you’re used to
  • Take about 1% of weight for vegetables and grains
  • And 2% salinity for water for cooking

• Salt doesn’t necessarily mean you need to use pepper too
  • And if you do, grind it just before you use pepper
• Salt can be used in conjunction with sugar
  • E.g. with a lovely dessert
• If you add too much salt, then:
  • Dilute, add unseasoned ingredients
  • Halve, and put away the rest for later
  • Balance, with acid or fat
  • Select, other things to balance the saltiness
  • Transform, into something that work with more salt
  • Admin defeat…
• Stir, taste, adjust
• Ask yourself: When? How much? In what form?

Fat

• Where oilive oil comes from has a huge effect on how it tastes
  • Oil from hot, dry, hilly areas is spicy
  • From coastal climates is milder in flavour

Three Body Problem

The Three-Body Problem – Liu Cixin

Summary: Great Sci-Fi novel that is intriguing and delivers on the big ideas.

I probably read this somewhere in the beginning of 2018, or end of 2017 for the first time. Now on 12 September 2019 I’ve re-read (or actually listened) it again.

The book does a great job of building such a large idea, whilst relying not too much on a whole new world (our world is in essence the same).

The characters are interesting and there is some suspence in it. But mostly it’s carried by the idea of Tri-solaris. I can highly recommend the series. Because after the first book, it gets even weirder.

The Paper Menagerie

TBD

The Elephant in the Brain

TBD

The Undoing Project

TBD