Originally an Harvard Business Review article, this short book teaches how to manage one’s career for success in the knowledge age. Drucker advises us to focus on improving our natural strengths rather than weaknesses, and to pay attention to aligning our work environment with our strengths as well as our values, and to pinpoint the few things where we might make our greatest contribution. I think the insights made are compelling, sensible, and often under-appreciated. Drucker’s points on learning style however, seems to have been debunked by the latest studies. Overall, this quick read is highly relevant for a modern knowledge-based employee.
- Focus on improving strengths rather than ameliorating weaknesses.
- Discover your strengths through Feedback Analysis.
- Remove any obstacles on improving your strengths. Don’t be arrogant to learn. Change or control bad habits.
- Avoid areas of low competence. It takes far more effort to improve from incompetence to mediocrity in a low talent area than to improve from competent to excellent in a talented area.
- Employ social skills when working with others. Manners is the lubrication in a working organization where there is inherent friction.
- How to work may be even more important than what to work (skills/ talents).
- Learning style: reader or listener or writer or talker?
- Collaboration: team player or loner?
- Leadership: leader or subordinate? Decision-maker or adviser?
- Environment: fast-paced and stressful or structured and predictable? Big or small company?
- Values: is the job/ organization’s values compatible with mine? Ultimate factor!
- What to work on?
- What does the situation require?
- Based on my strengths, how I work, and my values, what can be my greatest contribution? Then proactively communicate this to your co-workers.
- Working relationships: learn what are the strengths, work styles, and values of your co-workers (because they are humans and they have their own individual ways of working), and then adapt to and leverage them to be most effective working with them. Take responsibility in communicating with them about your own style/ work and ask them about theirs.
- Unlike manual laborers, modern knowledge workers are a new breed who must learn to self-manage their careers like a CEO. They live longer, are more mobile, and will outgrow their organizations, usually due to boredom or lack of progression. They should plan early for a second option, a second avenue for success: a second career, a parallel career, or a social venture (e.g. volunteering).
Finished: 17-Feb-2018. Rating: 8/10.