Managing Oneself
Short book reprinting his 1999 HBR article
Summary
Drucker's short piece, originally a Harvard Business Review article and published separately as a book, argues that knowledge workers must manage their own careers because organisations no longer do it for them, and that this requires answering a specific set of questions about oneself honestly. The questions are: What are my strengths? How do I perform? What are my values? Where do I belong? What should I contribute?
On strengths, Drucker recommends feedback analysis, meaning that whenever you make a significant decision you write down what you expect to happen, and compare it to the outcome nine to twelve months later. He states that this is the only reliable way to identify strengths, because people are consistently wrong about their own.
On how you perform, he distinguishes readers from listeners, and learners who learn by writing, by doing or by talking, and argues that these are fixed traits that people should accommodate rather than attempt to change. He also asks whether a person works better alone or with others, as a decision-maker or as an adviser, and under stress or in structured environments.
On values, he argues that a person must be able to work in an organisation whose value system they can accept, and that a mismatch produces failure regardless of competence. He covers the second half of life, arguing that knowledge workers outlive their organisations and their first careers, and that a second career, a parallel career or a social venture should be started before it is needed. The piece is short and offers no evidence. Feedback analysis is the practical technique and few people do it.
Key takeaways 8
- Knowledge workers must manage their own careers because organisations no longer do it for them.
- People are consistently wrong about their own strengths, and the only reliable method for identifying them is recording expected outcomes and comparing them later.
- Effort should go into improving strengths rather than into repairing weaknesses, because the return on moving from competence to excellence exceeds the return on moving from incompetence to mediocrity.
- Whether a person is a reader or a listener is fixed, and working against it produces failure that looks like incompetence.
- How a person learns, whether by writing, talking or doing, is also fixed and should be accommodated rather than corrected.
- A person must be able to accept the value system of the organisation they work in, and a mismatch produces failure regardless of ability.
- Knowledge workers outlive their first careers and their organisations, so a second career or a parallel activity should be started before it is needed.
- Deciding what to contribute requires asking what the situation requires, what your strengths permit, and what results would make a difference, in that order.
Who should read it
Any knowledge worker planning a career deliberately, wanting a short set of questions and one concrete technique for self-assessment.
About Peter F. Drucker
Management writer and consultant; professor at Bennington, NYU and Claremont Graduate University
He invented management as a field of study, and The Practice of Management and The Effective Executive remain the primary sources every later writer builds on.
Where it sits in the reference 2
Who recommended it 5 · 3 direct
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