Everybody is a CEO
I have been reading Peter Drucker's Management Challenges for the 21st Century. In his final chapter, entitled “Managing Oneself,” Peter makes a compelling case for how most knowledge workers will have to manage themselves:
They will have to place themselves where they can make the greatest contribution; they will have to learn to develop themselves. they will have to learn to stay young and mentally alive during a fifty-year working life. They have to learn how and when to change what they do, how they do it and when they do it.
Knowledge workers have to ask themselves:
1. Who am I? What are My Strengths? How do I work?
2. Where do I belong?
3. What is my contribution?
4. What is my relationship responsibility?
5. How do I plan for the second half of my life?
Drucker describes Managing oneself as a “REVOLUTION in human affairs:
It requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. For in effect it demands that each knowledge worker think and behave as a Chief Executive Officer. It requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers' thoughts and actions from what most of us–even the younger generation–still take for granted as the way to think and act.”
My own experiencing with blogging is that it can help people think and behave like CEOs of their own careers. While journalism may be the first draft of history, my blog(s) are the first draft of my career and business plans. I use my blog to work out my ideas, share them, and get feedback. And as I come to my own conclusions about things and write about them, like-minded people find me, expanding my network. My blog helps me answer the critical questions Drucker poses. By going public with my ideas, I am in a constant process of developing myself–ever planning for the second half of my life, which is now just around the corner.
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