Managing Oneself – Introduction

Peter F. Drucker

“It demands that each knowledge worker think and behave as a Chief Executive Officer”

Introduction

More and more people in the workforce—and 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 will have to learn how and when to change what they do, how they do it and when they do it.

Knowledge workers, therefore, face drastically new demands

Knowledge workers are likely to outlive their employing organization. Even if knowledge workers postpone entry into the labor force as long as possible—if, for instance, they stay in school till their late twenties to get a doctorate—they are likely, with present life expectancies in the developed countries, to live into their eighties. And they are likely to have to keep working, if only part-time, until they are around seventy-five or older. The average working life, in other words, is likely to be fifty years, especially for knowledge workers. But the average life expectancy of a successful business is only thirty years—and in a period of great turbulence such as the one we are living in, it is unlikely to be even that long.

Even organizations that normally are long-lived if not expected to live forever—schools and universities, hospitals, government agencies—will see rapid changes in the period of turbulence we have already entered. Even if they survive—and a great many surely will not, at least not in their present form—they will change their structure, the work they are doing, the knowledges they require and the kind of people they employ. Increasing therefore, workers, and especially knowledge workers, will outlive any one employer, and will have to be prepared for more than one job, more than one assignment, more than one career.

So far, this book has dealt with changes in the environment in society, economy, politics, technology. This concluding chapter deals with the new demands on the individual.

The very great achievers, a Napoleon, a Leonardo da Vinci, a Mozart. have always managed themselves. This in large measure made them great achievers. But they were the rarest of exceptions. And they were so unusual, both in their talents and in their achievements, as to be considered outside the boundaries of normal human existence. Now even people of modest endowments, that is, average mediocrities, will have to learn to manage themselves.