Brent P. Newhall's Blog

There are a number of blog posts and articles about essential business books. “Ten books everyone entering the working world should read,” and such.

I only have two.

One, Getting Things Done, I’ve already talked about quite a bit here. Just about everyone needs some way to organize their work. GTD does a great job of explaining what you need to track (and what you don’t).

But today, I want to write about Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive. Drucker’s the best writer on business and management I’ve ever read, and this is my favorite of his books. It’s also the most directly helpful to regular workers.

First, an explanation: By “Executive,” Drucker’s referring to anyone in an organization who executes. So, the book’s aimed at those who work with their brain, which seems to be a large majority of the work force these days.

The book is a rumination on—and a set of advice for—knowledge workers. We have to be responsible for our own work, while also fitting into a larger organization. We have to manage our own time, while respecting time restraints placed on us. We have to be independent and lead, appropriately.

Here are a few of his insights:

• Effective executives ask “What needs to be done?” and “What’s right for this company?”
• Take responsibility for communicating
• Take responsibility for decisions, and make some
• Run highly efficient and productive meetings
• Think “we” instead of “I”

Which sounds like standard business advice. But each one of these (and more) are accompanied by in-depth thought and advice. There’s plenty of analysis of what this means, and all of it is clear and concise.

The book’s amazingly valuable, if just to help one re-think one’s place and responsibilities.

So imagine a Japanese film, set in the 1960’s, involving a down-and-out Japanese private investigator named Maiku Hamma (“My real name,” he says), who takes a missing-person case and winds up in the middle of a yakuza/triad turf war. He drives a convertible, wears a samurai-style jacket, and has an shoebox-sized office over a movie theater (you have to buy a ticket for the latest movie just to go up to see him).

It exists. It’s called The Most Terrible Time In My Life.

The director, Kaizo Hayashi, was obviously influenced by French New Wave, American noir, samurai, and yakuza films. Everything’s in black-and-white (almost), the characters are almost all tense (or hiding something, or both), and there’s even a brief scene with Maiku’s “mentor,” who wears a white suit and uses a cane.

(If you’re a die-hard MST3K fan, you’ll be tickled to learn that the aforementioned white-suited mentor is played by the thick-jowled spaceship captain from “Star Force: Fugitive Alien” and “Fugitive Alien II,” he of the maniacal laughter followed by “You’re stuck here!”)

See, this movie should be a terrible mess. This should be confusing. Instead, while the film certainly has its flaws, all of these elements work together.

Why? Because the director’s influenced by all those disparate film styles; he’s not trying to make a film that embodies all of them. He uses those styles to create effective scenes. They’re all tools.

The result is a remarkably entertaining film. It starts out as simply great fun, then grows increasingly dark and brooding as the various plotlines accelerate towards the (inevitably bloody) end. Which is exactly as it should be for this sort of film. As long as you aren’t expecting a mindless, high-speed action flick—Japanese movies rarely are—you’ll probably get it.

And you’ll find a weird, wonderful little gem. I can’t wait to see the sequel.