Managing oneself Notes

Managing Oneself

by Peter F. Drucker

URL: Managing Oneself (hbr.org)

1. What are my strengths?

1.1 The way to discover your strengths

​ Practiced consistently, this simple method will show you within a fairly short period of time, maybe two or three years, where your strengths lies.

1.2 Act on your strengths

• Concentrate on your strengths.

• Work on improving your strengths.

• Overcome your arrogance, which leads to ignorance.

  Being bright is not a substitute for knowledge.

• Remedy your bad habits.

• Learn some manners.

• Compare your expectations with your results, and find out what you should not to do.

  It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.

  Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.

2. How do I perform?

2.1 Reader and listener

​ Reader, and working on being a listener.

2.2 The way I learn

• Learning through extensive practice.
• there is no clear demarcation as to whether I am more suited for a subordinate or a superior position.
• Do not try to change yourself— you are unlikely to succeed. But work hard to improve the way you perform. And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.

3 What are my values?

4 Where do I belong?

5 What should I contribute?

​ A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific.

• First, the results should be hard to achieve, and also, they should be within reach.
• Second, the results should be meaningful.
• Finally, results should be visible and, if at all possible, measurable.
• And there will be a course of action: what to do, where and how to start, and what goals and deadlines to set.

6 Responsibility for relationships

​ The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are.

​ The first secret of effectiveness is to understand the people you work with and depend on so that you can make use of their strengths, their ways of working, and their values.

​ The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication.

7 The second half of your life

​ That means finding a second area—whether in a second career, a parallel career, or a social venture—that offers an opportunity for being a leader, for being respected, for being a success.