HBR 100: Managing Oneself

19 Aug 2022 Categorised under:  Personal

Preamble

I bought a book at Durham International Airport on my way back from US to Singapore. The title of the book is HBR at 100. One of the first essays within is Peter Drucker’s “Managing Oneself”. Here is a summary of the main points.

TLDR

Managing oneself is about understanding your strengths, ways you perform, your values, where you belong, your relationships and managing secondary interests. A seminal piece of work in self awareness IMO.

What are my strengths?

• Feedback analysis: This is a method where you write down what you expect will happen, whenever you make a key decision or take a key action. Nine or twelve months down the road, compare the results with your expected outcome. The author said that he was always surprised by what he discovered from this exercise.
• Concentrate on your strengths: From the analysis, put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
• Improving your strengths: From the analysis, plug your gaps in knowledge. Acquire new skills or improve current skills.
• Discover where your intelligence arrogance is: Far too many people are contemptous of knowledge in other areas outside of their expertise or they believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge. First rate engineers take pride in not knowing anything about humans because humans in their mind are too disorderly. Human resource managers take pride in not knowing any quantitative methods. But taking pride in such self ignorance is self defeating. Go to work on acquiring skills and knowledge you need to fully realise your strengths.

How do I perform?

• Achieve results by working in ways that you best perform because how one performs is unique, like personality. It is formed way before a person starts working.
• For instance, most people are either listeners or readers. Readers (e.g. Dwight Eissenhower) are poor performers if they have to listen to people’s discussions or questions as part of their work. Listeners (e.g. Lyndon Johnson) behave reversely. They tend be poor performers if they have to read detailed memos and material as part of their work.
• To perform, one has to figure out how they learn. Again, do you learn better by reading or listening?
• To perform, one has to lean on his strengths. Have you done your feedback analysis? Are you a loner or do you work better in teams? Can you lead or are you better off as a subordinate?

What are my values?

• To understand your values, you can perform the “mirror test”. Ethics requires that you ask yourself what kind of person do I want to see in the mirror in the morning?
• Incomptabile value system between organization and individuals condemns one to non performance.

Where do I belong?

• After answering “What are my strengths?”, “How do I perform?”, “What are my values?”, one can then decide where one belongs. Minimally, one should be able to tell where they don’t belong.
• 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.

Responsibility for relationships

• Accept that other individuals, who are in a relationship with you, are just like you.
• Take time to understand them: What are their strengths? How do they perform? What are their values?
• This is the essence of managing your boss: Communication to achieve that understanding.

Second half of your life

• As equally important as your primary job is to have a secondary job, a side hustle.
• Not everyone can succeed in their primary job.
• Should you fail or find your work boring in your primary job, not all is doom and gloom.
• Furthermore, the secondary job might develop into the second career.