The Effective Executive

The Captain in the Jungle

Somewhere in the jungles of Vietnam in the mid-1960s, an American journalist asked a young infantry captain how he commanded his men. The captain shrugged. Around here, he said, I'm only the guy who's responsible. If these men don't know what to do when they run into an enemy in the jungle, I'm too far away to tell them. My job is to make sure they know. What they do depends on the situation, which only they can judge. The responsibility is always mine, but the decision lies with whoever is on the spot.

Peter Drucker quotes that captain in the opening pages of The Effective Executive, and the whole book sits inside that quote. In a guerrilla war, Drucker writes, every man is an executive. The same is true in a hospital, a research lab, a software company, a school district, a nonprofit. Anywhere knowledge work matters, the person on the spot owns the decision. The old picture of an executive as a man in a corner office issuing orders to a chain of subordinates dies in the first chapter.

That is why this book, first published in 1966 and reissued decade after decade since, still gets assigned to MBA students sixty years later. Drucker isn't writing for the chief executive of General Motors. He's writing for anyone whose contribution comes from thinking — anyone whose work cannot be measured in pairs of shoes per hour, whose value to the organization is set not by effort or hours logged but by the rightness of what they choose to do.

The premise is unfashionable and slightly austere. Drucker had spent forty-five years consulting with executives by the time he wrote the preface to a later edition, and in those four decades, he said, he had never met a single natural — an executive who was born effective. Every effective person he knew had learned the skill. None of them had the same personality. He'd worked with introverts and extroverts, drunks and abstainers, charmers and people with no more personality than a frozen mackerel. What they had in common was not temperament. It was a small set of practices, repeated until they became habit.