Managing Oneself Book Summary
Note: This summary is made up of my notes, thoughts and highlights of important passages while reading the book. I keep updating the summary when I revisit it, and occasionally may edit it to reduce summary length. Don’t be surprised if it has changed between visits. The author’s words are in normal font, while my interpretations are in italics.
History’s great achievers – a Napoléon, a da Vinci, a Mozart – have always managed themselves. That, in large measure, is what makes them great achievers.
What are my strengths?
- One cannot build performance on weaknesses, let alone on something one cannot do at all.
- 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.
Concentrate on your strengths.
Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.
- 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.
- Discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.
- Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths.
- Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do.
- It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
- One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.
- Energy, resources, and time should go instead to making a competent person into a star performer.
Like so many brilliant people, he believes that ideas move mountains.
But bulldozers move mountains;
Ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.
- The work does not stop when the plan is completed. He must find people to carry out the plan and explain it to them. He must adapt and change it as he puts it into action. And finally, he must decide when to stop pushing the plan.
- It is a law of nature that two moving bodies in contact with each other create friction.
Manners are the lubricating oil of an organization.
How do I perform?
- Amazingly few people know how they get things done.
- Like one’s strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality.
- How a person performs is a given, just as what a person is good at or not good at is a given.
- A person’s way of performing can be slightly modified, but it is unlikely to be completely changed -and certainly not easily.
The first thing to know is whether you are a reader or a listener.
- Few listeners can be made, or can make themselves, into competent readers—and vice versa.
The second thing to know about how one performs is to know how one learns.
- Writers do not, as a rule, learn by listening and reading. They learn by writing.
- Some people learn by doing. Others learn by hearing themselves talk.
- Of all the important pieces of self-knowledge, understanding how you learn is the easiest to acquire.
- Am I a reader or a listener? and How do I learn? are the first questions to ask. But they are by no means the only ones. To manage yourself effectively, you also have to ask, Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if you do work well with people, you then must ask, In what relationship? Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser?
- The number two person in an organization often fails when promoted to the number one position. The top spot requires a decision maker.
- Do I work best in a big organization or a small one?
The conclusion bears repeating:
Do not try to change yourself—you are unlikely to succeed.
But work hard to improve the way you perform.
And try not to take on work you cannot perform or will only perform poorly.
What are my values?
- To work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one’s own condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.
- Whether a business should be run for short-term results or with a focus on the long term is likewise a question of values.
- Organizations, like people, have values. To be effective in an organization, a person’s values must be compatible with the organization’s values.
- A person’s strengths and the way that person performs rarely conflict; the two are complementary.
- There is sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and his or her strengths.
Where do I belong?
By mid 20s one should know the answers to the three questions:
- What are my strengths?
- How do I perform? and,
- What are my values?
And then they can and should decide where they 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.
Knowing where one belongs can transform an ordinary person—hardworking and competent but otherwise mediocre—into an outstanding performer.
What should I contribute?
Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfillment, and success achieved any of the three.
What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements:
- What does the situation require?
- Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done?
- And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?
It is rarely possible—or even particularly fruitful—to look too far ahead. A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific.
Where and how can I achieve results that will make a difference within the next year and a half?
Responsibility for relationships
Managing yourself requires taking responsibility for relationships. This has two parts.
- The first is to accept the fact that other people are as much individuals as you yourself are. They perversely insist on behaving like human beings. This means that they too have their strengths; they too have their ways of getting things done; they too have their values. It is incumbent on the people who work with them to observe them, to find out how they work, and to adapt themselves to what makes their bosses most effective. This, in fact, is the secret of “managing” the boss.
- The second part of relationship responsibility is taking responsibility for communication.
Organizations are no longer built on force but on trust.
The existence of trust between people does not necessarily mean that they like one another. It means that they understand one another.
The second half of your life
Today, however, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not “finished” after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
Managing oneself increasingly leads one to begin a second career.
There are a few ways to develop a second career.
- The first is actually to start one. Often this takes nothing more than moving from one kind of organization to another.
- The second way to prepare for the second half of your life is to develop a parallel career. There are the social entrepreneurs. These are usually people who have been very successful in their first careers. They love their work, but it no longer challenges them. In many cases they keep on doing what they have been doing all along but spend less and less of their time on it.
People who manage the second half of their lives may always be a minority. The majority may “retire on the job” and count the years until their actual retirement.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it.
- No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in his or her life or work.
- In a society in which success has become so terribly important, having options will become increasingly vital.
- Historically, there was no such thing as “success.” The over-whelming majority of people did not expect anything but to stay in their “proper station.”
- In a knowledge society we expect everyone to be a success. This is clearly an impossibility. For a great many people, there is at best an absence of failure.
- In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer.
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