This post is part of a series on The Effective Executive (by Peter F. Drucker). You can find the first post here. In this post I’m going to tackle chapter 3: what can I contribute?
Month: August 2017
The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker is one of my favorite business books of all time. It should be on every 10x programmer’s reading list for two reasons. First, it offers knowledge workers (including computer programmers) a guide to becoming ridiculously effective. Secondly, many millions of business people have read this very influential book and by reading it, you will gain insight into how many business people set priorities and approach their work.
No matter how good of a programmer you are, I promise you that you can get better by reading this book and applying its lessons.
In my last post I gave you a brief introduction to managerial accounting, showed you how to calculate contribution margin per unit, and told you why it is important. In this post I’m going to show you how I calculated our contribution margin per unit for every product we sell and how we used that analysis to change the course of our company.
I want to tell you the story of one of the biggest impacts I ever made. I’m going to assume that you don’t know much managerial accounting. That’s fine; I didn’t either when I started this project. I’m going to give you a five minute tutorial on managerial accounting in this post. Your goal is to understand how to calculate contribution margin per unit and why it’s important. Then I’ll get to my story.