The 1999 Leadership and Management Conference

Managing Oneself by Peter F. Drucker

Excerpts from Drucker Foundation Leadership and Management Conference
Redefining Leadership, Organizations, and Communities
November 9, 1999 Closing Plenary Session

n a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long term perspective, I think it is very probable that the most important event these historians will see is not technology, it is not the Internet, it is not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time -- and I mean that literally -- for the first time, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And let me say, we are totally unprepared for it.

Opportunities of Choice

nd now suddenly a very large -- still a minority, but it's growing -- [number] of people have choices. And what is more, they will have more than one career. The working life span of people is now close to sixty years. You got twenty years in 1900.

In a very short time, we will no longer believe that retirement means the end of working life. Retirement may be even earlier than it has been, but working life will continue if only out of economic necessity. It is predictable that within the next twenty-five years most people will still keep on working, perhaps not full-time, not as employees of a company -- as temps, as part-timers, but still working till they are in their seventies -- in part, maybe for economic reasons. I hope that my grandchildren will not be foolish enough to be willing to give thirty-five percent of their income to support older people who are perfectly capable of working. Very few people will be able, no matter how much they put into their retirement accounts, to live without some additional income.

But also, knowledge gives choice. And when I talk to the people in my executive management program, (who are forty-five years-old on average, and successful people, sixty percent business, forty percent non-business), every one says, "I do not expect to end my career where I am working now."

If your father was a lawyer, you were a lawyer, or maybe a doctor, but a professional, and so on. And you were born into maybe not the profession, maybe not the work, but certainly the class in which you spent your life. And that is no longer true of knowledge.

Responsibilities of Choice

o, we will have to learn, first, who we are. We don't know. When I ask the students of mine -- and these are successful people, "Do you know what you're good at?" almost not one of them knows. "Do you know what you need to learn so that you get the full benefit of your strengths?" Not one of them has even asked that question.

On the contrary, most of them are very proud of their ignorance. You have those human relations people who are exceedingly proud of the fact that they can't read a balance sheet. Yet if you want to be effective today, you have to be able to read one. But on the other hand, there are the accountants who are equally proud of the fact that they can't get along with human beings!

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ery few people know where they belong, what kind of temperament and person they are. "Do I work with people, or am I a loner?" And "What are my values? What am I committed to?" And "Where do I belong? What is my contribution?"

And this is, as I said, unprecedented. Those questions never -- well, yes, the super-achievers asked them. Leonardo DaVinci had one whole notebook in which he asked these questions of himself. And Mozart knew it and knew it very well. He's the only man in the history of music who was equally good on two totally different instruments. He wasn't only a great piano virtuoso; he was an incredible violin virtuoso. And yet, he decided you can only be good in one instrument, because to be good, you have to practice three hours a day. There are not enough hours a day, and so he gave up the violin. He knew it, and he wrote it down. And we have his notebooks.

The superachievers always knew when to say "No." And they always knew what to reach for. And they always knew where to place themselves. That makes them super achievers. And now all of us will have to learn that. It's not very difficult. The key to it is -- what Leonardo did and what Mozart did -- is to write it down and then to check it.

The key is that every time you do something that is important, write down what you expect will happen. "What are the results of this decision?" The most important decisions in organizations are people decisions, and yet only the military, and only very recently, have begun to ask the question, "If you put this man in to help this base, what do we expect this general to accomplish?" And then they look at it three years later. And they have now reached a point where forty percent of their decisions work out.

Building on Strengths

t's very easy to learn "what my strengths are" by putting down the results. And let me say most of us underweigh our strengths. We take them for granted. What we are good at comes easy, and we believe that unless it comes hard, it can't be any good. So we don't know our strengths, and we don't know what we need to improve them.

And we don't know what the good Lord has not endowed us with. Yes, in extreme cases -- I didn't need any feedback to know that I am not a painter. The first time I took a crayon in my hands at age two, I think I knew it. Extreme cases, but in between? You don't really know that "this is not for me." And so we are at an unprecedented place, and most educated people in the next thirty years, will have to learn to place themselves.

We will have to learn where we belong, what our strengths are, what we have to learn so that we get the full benefit from it, where our defects are, what we are not good at, where we belong, what our values are. For the first time in human history, we will have to learn to take responsibility for managing ourselves. And as I said, this is probably a much bigger change than any technology -- a change in the human condition. Nobody teaches it -- no school, no college -- and [it] probably will be another hundred years before they teach it.

In the meantime, the achievers, and I don't mean millionaires, but rather the ones who want to make a contribution, who want to lead a fulfilling life, and want to feel that there is some purpose in their being on this earth. They will have to learn something which, only a few years ago, a very few super achievers ever knew. They will have to learn to manage themselves, to build on their strengths, to build on their values.

The Role of the Social Sector

nd one important implication for the social sector. There is no better way to find out where you belong than to be a volunteer in a nonprofit. And my friends in business always come to me with enormous development programs for their people, and I take a very dim view of them. Because the real development I've seen of people in organizations, especially in big ones, comes from their being volunteers in an organization. You have responsibility, you see results, and you very soon find out what your values are. And so let me say, this is probably the great opportunity for the nonprofits -- and especially for their relationship to business.

We have long been talking of the social responsibilities of business. I hope we will soon begin to talk about the nonprofit as the great social opportunity for business. It is the opportunity for business to have manager development -- far more than any company, university -- to be a volunteer with this church, or with the Girl Scouts, or with any of the organizations in this room.