Week 29th 2020
Managing Oneself - Harvard Business Review Classics
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We live in an age of unprecedented opportunity: with ambition, drive, and talent, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession regardless of where you started out.
But with opportunity comes responsibility!
Companies today aren't managing the careers of their knowledge workers. Instead, you must be your own chief executive officer. That means it's up to you to carve out your place in the world and know when to change course. And it's up to you to keep yourself engaged and productive during a career that may span some 50 years.
In Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker explains how to do it.
The keys:
Cultivate a deep understanding of yourself by identifying your most valuable strengths and most dangerous weaknesses;
Articulate how you learn and work with others and what your most deeply held values are;
Describe the type of work environment where you can make the greatest contribution.
Only when you operate with a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true and lasting excellence.
Managing Oneself identifies the probing questions you need to ask to gain the insights essential for taking charge of your career.
Peter Drucker was a writer, teacher, and consultant. His 34 books have been published in more than 70 languages. He founded the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management, and counseled 13 governments, public services institutions, and major corporations.
“It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves - their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“Successful careers are not planned. They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strengths, their method of work, and their values.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“Schools everywhere are organized on the assumption that there is only one right way to learn and that it is the same way for everybody.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“You should not change yourself, but create yourself, that mean build around your strengths and removing bad habits.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“If you have a goal that you still postpone, that means, it's not one of your strengths.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“We need to know our strengths in order to know where we belong.” ― Peter F. Drucker
“We will have to learn to develop ourselves. We will have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution. And we will have to stay mentally alert and engaged during a 50-year working life, which means knowing how and when to change the work we do.” ― Peter F. Drucker
About Peter F. Drucker?
Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909–2005) is one of the best-known and most widely influential thinkers on the subject of management theory and practice, and his writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern corporation.
Peter Drucker was a writer, management consultant and university professor. His writing focused on management-related literature. He made famous the term knowledge worker and is thought to have unknowingly ushered in the knowledge economy, which effectively challenges Karl Marx's world-view of the political economy. George Orwell credits Peter Drucker as one of the only writers to predict the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.
The son of a high level civil servant in the Habsburg empire, Drucker was born in the chocolate capital of Austria, in a small village named Kaasgraben (now a suburb of Vienna, part of the 19th district, Döbling). Following the defeat of Austria-Hungary in World War I, there were few opportunities for employment in Vienna so after finishing school he went to Germany, first working in banking and then in journalism. While in Germany, he earned a doctorate in International Law. The rise of Nazism forced him to leave Germany in 1933. After spending four years in London, in 1937 he moved permanently to the United States, where he became a university professor as well as a freelance writer and business guru. In 1943 he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. He taught at New York University as a Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. From 1971 to his death he was the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont Graduate University.
Often described as "the father of modern management theory," Drucker explored how people are organized across the business, government, and nonprofit sectors of society; he predicted many of the major business developments of the late twentieth century, including privatization and decentralization, the rise of Japan to economic world power, the critical importance of marketing, and the emergence of the information society with its implicit necessity of lifelong learning. In 1959, Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" and in his later life considered knowledge-worker productivity to be the next frontier of management.
Peter Drucker died on November 11, 2005, in Claremont, California. He had four children and six grandchildren.
You can read more about Peter F. Drucker at the Drucker Institute.