Rather than obsess over our natural shortcomings, work to being them up to a level where they are not holding you back. She reassured us no one can be great at everything. Why? it takes more effort to go from incompetent to mediocre than from competent to excellence.Įxamples: in one of the first manager training programs I undertook early in my career, the coach had us all do a DISC assesment. Next I'll go into more detail on some of the guidelines. Structure an organisation for short term results or long term growth.Pick a role and organisation that fits your values.Share values and ways of learning with coworkers.Take responsibility for relationships & for communication.Distinguish between strengths and values.When scaling an organization, combine external hires with growth from within What kind of work environment suits me best (structured or unstructured)?.How do I work best with others (alone, subordinate, coach)?.How do I learn best? (read, write, listen, talk, do).What are my strengths? (using feedback analysis).Later I’ll go into a little more detail on some of them. As a summary, here are all the guidelines I found in the article as a nested list. In essence they provide a good practice: what to do, how, when and why. Each guideline is a solution to a problem. In this post, I’m trying to extract the “guidelines” from Drucker’s article. Later he explained he had been shaving and looked in the mirror and said to himself “I refuse to see a pimp in the mirror in the morning when I shave.” Rather than organize the dinner, the ambassador resigned. The king was a known philanderer and it had been made clear to the ambassador that the king expected extra guests.

He had been asked to host a dinner for the King of England at the time, Edward VII. In 1906, the German Ambassador to Britain resigned unexpectedly. In this blog post, I’ll summarise the key guidelines from the article including a brief story about the ambassador who refused to be a pimp. In his classic 1999 HBR article Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker explains how knowledge workers (and indeed all humans) can understand themselves and navigate their careers.

Drucker managing oneself