Bu maçta Peter Drucker'ın The Effective Executive (Etkili Yönetici) kitabıyla Alasdair Whittle tarafından yazılmış The Archaelogy of People - Dimensions of Neolithic Life (Halkın Arkeolojisi - Neolitik Hayatın Boyutları) kitaplarını karşılaştırdım.

Drucker'ın kitabı yöneticilik anlatıyor. Daha önce pek efektif olmasa da dinlediğim bir kitap. Yöneticinin en değerli kaynağı zamanıdır ve etkililiğini zamanını nasıl kullandığı belirler ana fikrinin üzerine, Amerikan iş ve politik hayatından örnekler vererek tavsiyelerde bulunuyor. Doğrudan ve tecrübeye dayalı bir anlatımı var ve bu yüzden tekrar tekrar okurum diyebildiğim bir kitap.

Whittle'ın kitabı akademik bir arkeoloji kitabı. Cilalı Taş Devrindeki insan yaşamını arkeolojik bulgular etrafında anlatıyor. Hemen her cümlede bir referans var ve sanırım bu yüzden okuması için hayli gayret gerekiyor. Chicago usulü isimli referanslar (Reşah 2020) dikkat dağıttığı ve okumayı zorlaştırdığı için teknik literatürde tercih edilmez. Bir sayfada bundan yirmi-otuz tane görünce insana dedikodu ediyor gibi geliyor. Taş devrinde günlük hayatın tarihi ilgimi çekse de, kitap akademik olmaya okunabilir olmaktan daha çok önem verdiği için fazla bir faydası olmadığını düşündüm.

The Effective Executive

One of Drucker’s most important insights is that an organization is like a biological organism in one key way: Internal mass grows at a faster rate than external surface; thus, as the organization grows, an increasing proportion of energy diverts to managing the internal mass rather than contributing to the outside world. Combine this with another Druckerian truth: The accomplishments of a single right person in a key seat dwarf the combined accomplishment of dividing the seat among multiple B-players. Get better people, give them really big things to do, enlarge their responsibilities, and let them work.

TO BE EFFECTIVE IS THE job of the executive. “To effect” and “to execute” are, after all, near-synonyms. Whether he works in a business or in a hospital, in a government agency or in a labor union, in a university or in the army, the executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply that he is expected to be effective.

Yet men of high effectiveness are conspicuous by their absence in executive jobs. High intelligence is common enough among executives. Imagination is far from rare. The level of knowledge tends to be high. But there seems to be little correlation between a man’s effectiveness and his intelligence, his imagination, or his knowledge.

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes. Then they attempt to manage their time and to cut back unproductive demands on their time. Finally they consolidate their “discretionary” time into the largest possible continuing units. This three-step process:

• recording time,

• managing time, and

• consolidating time is the foundation of executive effectiveness

Everything requires time. It is the one truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource. Nothing else, perhaps, distinguishes effective executives as much as their tender loving care of time.

Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., former head of General Motors, the world’s largest manufacturing company, was reported never to make a personnel decision the first time it came up. He made a tentative judgment, and even that took several hours as a rule. Then, a few days or weeks later, he tackled the question again, as if he had never worked on it before. Only when he came up with the same name two or three times in a row was he willing to go ahead. Sloan had a deserved reputation for the “winners” he picked. But when asked about his secret, he is reported to have said: “No secret—I have simply accepted that the first name I come up with is likely to be the wrong name—and I therefore retrace the whole process of thought and analysis a few times before I act.” Yet Sloan was far from a patient man.

The more time we take out of the task of the “legs”—that is, of physical, manual work—the more will we have to spend on the work of the “head”—that is, on knowledge work. The easier we make it for rank-and-file workers, machine tenders as well as clerks, the more will have to be done by the knowledge worker. One cannot “take knowledge out of the work.” It has to be put back somewhere—and in much larger and cohesive amounts.

A good example was Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, “Lord Heart of the Matter” and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington.

Archaeology of People

It is impossible to envisage a Neolithic world in any detail without thinking about the conditions in which people, day after day, and from season to season, cooked, ate, gathered, talked, resided, looked after their animals, or moved through and attended to the landscapes which they inhabited.

Not only are the ancestors not the generally benevolent force imagined in much of the archaeological literature, it becomes clear in the case of the Suku, and of other people in the region, that the key distinction is not between the living and the dead but between elders and non-elders. The Suku setting is the corporate matrilineage (Kopytoff 1971, 130). In this, juniors owe respect to seniors, and older seniors, or living elders, look to the dead for guidance and help in times of crisis; of necessity the dead must be approached differently from the living