10 Lessons from Peter Drucker

Manage yourself before you expect to manage others. Lead by example.
Align your career with your natural interests and strengths. Focusing your efforts in other areas will diminish your chance to be remarkable.
Embrace your work habit tendencies (e.g. noise, working at night, etc).
Create unbroken blocks of individual think time (ideally these will be when you feel most alert and focused). Also, create chunks of deliberately unstructured time for the people and things that haven't been planned.
Prepare meetings with intent. Don't let them run off course.
Zoom out and make generic decisions that can apply to a lot of specific situations. Ignore most possibilities/nuances.
Identify opportunities that will contribute the most. Focus on the biggest impact you can have.
Avoid the other less impactful work you are tempted to do. Similar to Buffet's idea of never doing the things in the bottom half of the list.
Work with better people. A great mentor is much better than multiple decent ones.
Be useful.

What is an Effective Executive?

An executive is anyone who, in their nature of their job, has to make decisions that impact the performance results of the whole. As for effective, it is anyone who adopts the principles outlined below.

How to be effective?

Asking what needs to be done and what is right for your venture. Putting the needs of the enterprise about your own needs/wants.
- Develop a practice of deep work (e.g. focusing all their attention to one task at a time). An organization benefits most from tackling the crucial issues with the right tools.
- Among the tasks to be done, focus on the ones you are best suited for (maximize output/time).
Having an action plan
- It is an statement of intentions (adhere to loosely), not intended to become a straightjacket of commitments. It provides guidance which will be reassessed once you learn more through experimentation.
- Needs a system to check the results agains the expectations. It needs to provide accurate feedback; perhaps expectations were way off.
- Needed to avoid becoming reactionary to events. Develops a focus on the true mission.
Taking responsibility for your decisions.
Taking responsibility for communication.