Managing Oneself is an article by Peter Drucker that can be found in HBR 2005.
Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves—their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.
Peter Drucker
What are my strengths?
- concentrate on strengths
- improve your strengths
- discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance
- remedy your bad habits
- courtesy/manners (please, thank you)
- waste little effort on improving areas of low competence
How do I perform?
- are you a reader or a listener?
- Eisenhower – reader not listener
- how do I learn?
- Churchill, Beethoven – learn by writing
- Patton – good subordinate / worst commander
- team members / work best alone / coaches/mentors / incompetent-mentors
- do I produce results as a DM (decision maker) or adviser
What are my values?
- mirror test
- working in an organization with a value system that’s unacceptable or incompatible leads to frustration and nonperformance
- values are the ultimate test
Where do I belong?
- decide where you do not belong
- successful careers aren’t planned – they develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their methods of work, and their values
What should I contribute?
Responsibility for relationships
- accept that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are
- take responsibility for communication
- organizations are no longer built on force but on trust
Second half of your life
3 ways
- start a second career
- parallel career
- social entrepreneur
one prerequisite – begin long before you enter it
another reason to develop a second major interest, and to develop it early: everyone should expect to experience a serious setback in his/her life/work. So it’s good to have a backup option.
It’s important for an individual to have an area in which he/she can contribute/make a difference/be somebody.
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