One sentence summary: Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker is a short but powerful book on succeeding in the knowledge economy.
One paragraph summary: Drucker’s main focus in Managing Oneself is how knowledge of oneself can allow you to grow and reach your full potential. The book offers penetrating insights into self-education, mindset, and Self-Management. It's a captivating read whose concepts will provoke deep thinking about your future.
“Those who know themselves–their strengths, their values, and how they best perform–will achieve success in the knowledge economy.”
Peter F. Drucker is regarded as the father of management thinking, having produced 39 volumes on the topic over a seven-decade period. Drucker's management publications are outstanding in terms of consistency and simplicity. He was a prolific author and an influential management theorist whose material is still used by executives worldwide. Drucker is also widely recognized as the pioneer of modern management studies.
His book Managing Oneself, has the power to transform your life for good.
What are your greatest assets?
How do you fare in terms of performance?
What ideals do you hold dear?
Do you know where you belong?
What should you bring to the table?
Relationship accountability
You're in your second half of life
Many people believe they know what they're good at, but they're almost always mistaken. You need to recognize your strengths to determine where you fit. Analyzing feedback is one way to go about it. For example, if you make a significant resolution, you should write down what you hope to accomplish. Then, you should compare the actual results to the expectations ten or eleven months later. This simple approach of feedback analysis, if used regularly, should reveal where your strengths lie, which is the most crucial thing to know.
The process will reveal:
What you are doing (or not doing) that prevents you from fully exploiting your abilities
Situations when you aren't exceptionally skilled
If you don't have any strengths and are unable to perform
Drucker illustrates how feedback analysis has numerous ramifications for action:
The first and most important step is to focus on your talents
The second step is to work on enhancing your strengths
The third step is to figure out where your intellectual arrogance leads to incapacitating ignorance and overcoming it
When you compare your achievements to your expectations, you'll see what you're good at and what you shouldn't do. Drucker puts it best when he says:
“Improving from incompetence to mediocrity takes significantly more energy than improving from first-rate performance to excellence.”
Therefore, you should put your time, energy, and resources into transforming from a competent individual into a star performer.
You are unlikely to succeed if you try to change yourself. Work to improve your performance.” — Drucker
Drucker says few people know how to get things done. Too many people work in ways that are unsuitable for them, which almost always results in underperformance. He makes an important point by stating that your performance is also unique, just like your strengths. It's a matter of personality that develops long before a person starts working. People get results by doing what they are good at, and they get results by working in the methods they perform best. A few overall personality qualities are usually indicators of how one performs.
The first step is to determine whether the individual is a reader or a listener A listener who tries to be a reader will most likely fail, and vice versa. This is because only a few people can change their working style while remaining competent.
The second thing to understand how one learns. Most individuals understand how they learn; the difficulty is that they do not act on this information, which is the key to success. ‘Do you deliver results as a decision-maker or an advisor?' is another essential question for Drucker. Knowing the difference will enable one to understand his role and what actions improve his performance.
The final characteristic to consider is if a person operates well under pressure or requires a highly controlled and predictable setting This means that instead of modifying oneself, one should work hard to improve one's performance.
Drucker explains that to manage yourself, you need to know the values you have put upon yourself. He talks about the “mirror- test," which refers to ethics, which is to say, what type of person would you want to see when you look in the mirror? Working in a company with a value system incompatible with your ideals will lead to frustration and underperformance. In that situation, the work may not appear to be worth devoting one's life to, or at least a significant portion of one's life, hence resulting in nonperformance. In other words, values are and should be the final determinant.
Knowing your strengths, how you perform, and your values are all important, but you should also choose where you belong. An individual who has learned that he or she does not perform in a large corporation should know how to decline a job offer from one. A person who has realized that he or she is not a decision-maker should decline a decision-making task. Knowing one's place in the world can change an average worker into a star performer.
Allen says that you can fool everyone else, but you can't fool your mind. It knows whether you've come to the conclusions you need to, or whether you've put reminders in a place that you can trust to resurface appropriately within your conscious mind.
AMost people have never had to think about what they should give because most of their tasks were assigned to them by a master or a mistress. New knowledge workers or organization men have relied on their corporation's head office to organize their professions. To answer the question ‘what should my contribution be?’ An individual must be able to deal with three different aspects:
What is the circumstance calling for?
How can I contribute the most to what needs to be done, given my strengths, performance style, and values?
What outcomes must be achieved to make a difference?
Understanding what one should contribute will result in knowing what to do, where and how to begin, and what goals and deadlines to set.
Relatively few people operate and produce accomplishments on their own. Most people work well with others and are effective in their interactions. Whether as a member of an organization or as an independent contractor, Managing Oneself necessitates taking responsibility for one's relationships. This has two parts:
Recognizing that other people, like you, are unique individuals. This entails recognizing that co-workers have strengths, as well as their methods of doing tasks and ideals
The second step is to take charge of communication. This will ensure that you know what you're attempting to accomplish, why you're trying to accomplish it, how you're going to accomplish it, and what results to expect.
Whether members of an organization, consultants, suppliers, or distributors, knowledge workers owe a sense of responsibility to their co-workers.
Drucker's view on knowledge workers' careers offers a path to the second part of their lives. This is because, by the age of 45, most CEOs have reached the pinnacle of their professional careers and are well aware of it. They are quite proficient at their occupations after twenty years of doing the same thing. They are not, however, learning, developing, or gaining challenges and fulfillment from their work. Knowledge workers will most likely have to continue for another twenty, if not twenty-five years.
Drucker says there are three ways to develop the second half of your life:
The first is to start one
The second is to develop a parallel career in preparation for the second half of your life
The final requirement for managing the second half of your life is to start long before reaching it
If you don't start volunteering when you're forty or so, you won't be volunteering when you're sixty. In a society where success is increasingly important, having options becomes increasingly essential. Having options is important for the individual and the individual's family because it allows them to make a difference and be someone. Finding a second field to work in, whether it's a second career, a parallel career, or a social venture, is essential. It will provide the opportunity to be a leader, to be respected, and to be successful. In practice, Managing Oneself necessitates that each knowledge worker thinks and acts like a CEO.
Managing Oneself y by Peter F. Drucker does live up to its title. The author outlines how to develop sel f-awareness skills to manage ourselves effectively. It all starts by recognizing your strengths, developing your ideals, and being proactive in shaping your career path.
Anyone who aspires to be a knowledge worker, an executive manager, or have a successful career, will find this book worthwhile.
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