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Life According
To Drucker
By Michael Alan Hamlin
March 29, 1999
Peter Drucker recreates himself as
a motivational writer in the most recent issue of Harvard Business
Review. Life in the knowledge era — where a 50-year career
is the norm — requires that we "learn to develop ourselves
and when to change the work we do." Doing these things successfully
requires that we ask ourselves a series of basic questions, beginning
with "What are my strengths?"
Okay, that comes across, well, let’s
say we haven’t blinked yet. Anyone who has applied for a job
or sat through an interview knows how to answer this question: I
work well with people. I’m an innovator. I hate cats.
But for Mr. Drucker, our responses
betray a substance-challenged, self-damaging act because we don’t
really know the answer. "The only way to discover your strengths
is through feedback analysis. Whenever you make a key decision or
take a key action, write down what you expect will happen. Nine
or 12 months later, compare the actual results with your expectations.
I have been practicing this method for 15 to 20 years now, and every
time I do it, I am surprised."
Sounds like Tom Hopkins or Stephen
Covey. And you don’t see many of their articles in the Review.
What’s gotten into Mr. Drucker?
The distinction is that for Messrs.
Hopkins and Covey feedback analysis is a tool for achieving results.
And that makes sense. Mr. Drucker notes that John Calvin and Ignatius
Loyola used the method to achieve "steadfast focus on performance
and results," which "explains why the institutions these
two men founded, the Calvinist church and the Jesuit order, came
to dominate Europe within 30 years."
But for Mr. Drucker, feedback analysis
also effectively identifies an individual’s strengths and weaknesses.
This knowledge is fundamental to achieving life’s potential:
a high return on your talent and intellectual attributes. "This
simple method will show you where your strengths lie — and
this is the most important thing to know," Mr. Drucker advises.
People need to know where they can most productively channel their
intellectual and physical resources to achieve success. But success
ultimately depends on how you act to apply what you learn.
The first thing to do is to play
to the strengths you’ve identified. Put simply, don’t
waste time doing things that are likely to provide a low return
on the investment in your talent. Next, work "on improving
your strengths. Analysis will rapidly show where you need to improve
skills or acquire new ones. It will also show the gaps in your knowledge
— and those can usually be filled. Mathematicians are born,
but everyone can learn trigonometry."
Well, almost everybody.
Third, Mr. Drucker counsels readers
to "discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling
ignorance and overcome it." People tend to belittle strengths
they don’t recognize in themselves. What that does is handicap
the critic by closing off streams of knowledge that the critic is
not likely to confront in the course of work of his own work, but
which may have profound effects on its success.
For example, engineers who brag about
the inadequacy of their people skills; and, human resource professionals
who are proud to say elementary accounting bores them. Those bad
habits need to be cured, not celebrated. Not for the purpose of
becoming proficient in something one’s strengths don’t
play to, but by enlisting others whose strengths complement your
own. Take a strategic planner, for instance, who creates elegant
blueprints that require people to transform into reality.
The planner, Mr. Drucker says, "believes
ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show
where the bulldozers should go to work. He must find people to carry
out the plan."
One of the huge ironies of life is
that our social, educational, and corporate systems expend enormous
amounts of energy and resources trying to create mediocre performers
out of incompetents. "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," Mr. Drucker observers. As a
result, the allocation of educational resources is inefficient.
Schools force individuals who learn best by writing, for instance,
to learn by reading.
"A chief executive I know,"
Mr. Drucker notes, "was in the habit of calling his entire
senior staff into his office once a week and then talking at them
for two or three hours. He would raise policy issues and argue three
different positions on each one. He rarely asked his associates
for comments or questions; he simply needed an audience to hear
himself talk. That’s how he learned." You don’t find
many classes like that in school.
Equally important in learning to
manage yourself is getting in touch with your values. What kind
of person do you want to look at in the mirror every morning? Values,
Mr. Drucker argues, should be the ultimate test that determines
where your strengths are best applied. If your values aren’t
in sync with your job or company’s work and values, it’s
unlikely that you’ll be successful. Not because you happen
to be a particularly good person, but because you’ll be engaged
in doing something you don’t believe in. You may not be entirely
moral, but you must be noble to succeed.
Mr. Drucker probes further into the
relationship between life success and spending it doing the things
you believe in. "Where do you belong?" he asks. And the
answer is "Most people, especially highly gifted people, do
not really know where they belong," until they are well into
their adult careers. The point is that careers are not planned,
they evolve. Whether they evolve well depends on whether you understand
your strengths, how you operate best, and your values.
"Knowing where one belongs can
transform an ordinary person — hard-working and competent but
otherwise mediocre — into an outstanding performer," Mr.
Drucker counsels.
Exceptional careers owe their success,
it seems, to rather ordinary imperatives. Keep track of your strengths,
demonstrate the courage to listen carefully to those you don’t
appreciate, and do what you believe in. There’s more, of course,
but ultimately it boils down to this: What do you want your life
to mean?
Copyright © 1999 The Events
& Awards Managers of Asia and
Hamlin-Iturralde Corporation. All rights reserved.
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