Managing Oneself (Part 3)

Peter F. Drucker

"What do you do with the second half of your life?"

“ Managing Oneself is 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”

The Second Half of Your Life

As said before: For the first time in human history, individuals can expect to outlive organizations. This creates a totally new challenge:

What to do with the second half of one’s life?

One can no longer expect that the organization for which one works at age thirty will still be around when one reaches age sixty. But also, forty or fifty years in the same kind of work is much too long for most people. They deteriorate, get bored, lose all joy in their work, “retire on the job” and become a burden to themselves and to everyone around them.

This is not necessarily true of the very top achievers such as very great artists. Claude Monet (1840-1926), the greatest Impressionist painter, was still painting masterpieces in his eighties, and working twelve hours a day, even though he had lost almost all his eyesight. Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), perhaps the greatest Post-Impressionist painter, similarly painted till he died in his nineties-and in his seventies invented a new style. The greatest musical instrumentalist of this century, the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973), planned to perform a new piece of music and practiced it on the very day on which he died at age ninety-seven. But these are the rarest of exceptions even among very great achievers. Neither Max Planck (1858-1947) nor Albert Einstein (1879-1955), the two giants of modem physics, did important scientific work after their forties. Planck had two more careers. After 1918-aged sixty-he reorganized German science. After being forced into retirement by the Nazis in 1933, he, in 1945, almost ninety, started once more to rebuild German science after Hitler’s fall. But Einstein retired in his forties to become a “famous man.”

There is a great deal of talk today about the “mid-life crisis” of the executive. It is mostly boredom. At age forty-five most executives have reached the peak of their business career and know it. After twenty years of doing very much the same kind of work, they are good at their jobs. But few are learning anything anymore, few are contributing anything anymore and few expect the job again to become a challenge and a satisfaction.

Manual workers who have been working for forty years—in the steel mill for instance, or in the cab of a locomotive—are physically and mentally tired long before they reach the end of their normal life expectancy, that is, well before they reach even traditional retirement age. They are “finished.” If they survive—and their life expectancy too has gone up to an average of seventy-five years or so—they are quite happy spending ten or fifteen years doing nothing, playing golf, going fishing, engaging in some minor hobby and so on. But knowledge workers are not “finished.” They are perfectly capable of functioning despite all kinds of minor complaints. And yet the original work that was so challenging when the knowledge worker was thirty has become a deadly bore when the knowledge worker is fifty—and still he or she is likely to face another fifteen if not another twenty years of work.

To manage oneself, therefore, will increasingly require preparing oneself for the second half of one’s life. (The best books on this subject are by Bob Buford a very successful businessman who himself has created his own second half of life. They are Half Time [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994] and Game Plan [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1997].)

There are three answers:

The first is actually to start a second and different career

(as Max Planck did).

Often this means only moving from one kind of an organization to another.

Typical are the middle-level American business executives who in substantial numbers move to a hospital, a university or some other nonprofit organization, around age forty-five or forty-eight, when the children are grown and the retirement pension is vested. In many cases they stay in the same kind of work. The divisional controller in the big corporation becomes, for instance, controller in a medium-sized hospital. But there are also a growing number of people who actually move into a different line of work. Increasingly, for instance, students in American Protestant theological seminaries are forty-five—rather than twenty-five—years old. They made a first career in business or government—some in medicine—and then, when the children are grown, move into the ministry. And so did a friend of mine who, after thirty years as a successful art museum director and curator, entered a seminary at age 55.

In the United States there is a fairly substantial number of middle-aged women who have worked for twenty years, in business or in local government, have risen to a junior management position and now, at age forty-five and with the children grown, enter law school. Three or four years later they then establish themselves as small-time lawyers in their local communities.

We will see much more of such second-career people who have achieved fair success in their first job. These people have substantial skills, for example, the divisional controller who moves into the local community hospital. They know how to work. They need a community and the house is empty with the children gone. They need the income, too. But above all, they need the challenge.

The Parallel Career

The second answer to the question of what to do with the second half of one’s life is to develop a parallel career.

A large and rapidly growing number of people—especially people who are very successful in their first careers—stay in the work they have been doing for twenty or twenty-five years. Many keep on working forty or fifty hours a week in their main and paid job. Some move from busy full-time to being part-time employees or become consultants. But then they create for them-selves a parallel job—usually in a nonprofit organization—and one that often takes another ten hours of work a week. They take over the administration of their church, for instance, or the presidency of the local Girl Scouts Council, they run the battered women shelter, they work for the local public library as children’s librarian, they sit on the local school board and so on.

And then, finally, the third answer—there are the “social entrepreneurs.”

These are usually people who have been very successful in their first profession, as businessmen, as physicians, as consultants, as university professors. They love their work, but it no longer challenges them. In many cases they keep on doing what they have been doing all along, though they spend less and less of their time on it. But they start another, and usually a non-profit, activity.

Here are some examples—beginning with Bob Buford, the author of the two books, mentioned above, about preparing for the second half of one’s life. Having built a very successful television and radio business, Buford still keeps on running it. But he first started and built a successful nonprofit organization to make the Protestant churches in America capable of survival; now he is building a second, equally successful organization to teach other social entrepreneurs how to manage their own private, nonprofit ventures while still running their original businesses. But there is also the equally successful lawyer—legal counsel to a big corporation—who has started a venture to establish model schools in his state.

People who manage the “second half” may always be a minority only. The majority may keep doing what they are doing now, that is, to retire on the job. being bored, keeping on with their routine and counting the years until retirement. But it will be this minority, the people who see the long working-life expectancy as an opportunity both for themselves and for society, who may increasingly become the leaders and the models. They, increasingly, will be the “success stories.”

There is one requirement for managing the second half of one’s life: to begin creating it long before one enters it.

Managing Oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs

When it first became clear thirty years ago that working-life expectancies were lengthening very fast, many observers (including myself) believed that retired people would increasingly become volunteers for American nonprofit institutions. This has not happened. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is forty or so, one will not volunteer when past sixty.

Similarly, all the social entrepreneurs I know began to work in their chosen second enterprise long before they reached their peak in their original business. The lawyer mentioned above began to do volunteer legal work for the schools in his state when he was around thirty-five. He got himself elected to a school board at age forty. When he reached fifty, and had amassed a substantial fortune, he then started his own enterprise to build and run model schools. He is, however, still working near-full-time as the lead counsel in the very big company that, as a very young lawyer, he had helped found.

There is another reason that managing yourself will increasingly mean that the knowledge worker develops a second major interest, and develops it early.

No one can expect to live very long without experiencing a serious setback in one’s life or in one’s work.

There is the competent engineer who at age forty-two is being passed over for promotion in the company. There is the competent college professor who at age forty-two realizes that she will stay forever in the small college in which she got her first appointment and will never get the professorship at the big university—even though she may be fully qualified for it. There are tragedies in one’s personal family life—the breakup of one’s marriage, the loss of a child.

And then a second major interest—and not just another hobby may make all the difference. The competent engineer passed over for promotion now knows that he has not been very successful in his job. But in his outside activity—for example, as treasurer in his local church—he has achieved success and continues to have success. One’s own family may break up, but in that outside activity there is still a community.

This will be increasingly important in a society in which success has become important.

Historically there was no such thing. The overwhelming majority of people did not expect anything but to stay in their “proper station,” as an old English prayer has it. The only mobility there was downward mobility. Success was practically unknown.

In a knowledge society we expect everyone to be a “success.” But this is clearly an impossibility.

For a great many people there is, at best, absence of failure. For where there is success, there has to be failure. And then it is vitally important for the individual—but equally for the individual’s family—that there be an area in which the individual contributes, makes a difference, and is somebody. That means having a second area, whether a second career, a parallel career, a social venture, a serious outside interest, all of them offering an opportunity for being a leader, for being respected, for being a success.

The changes and challenges of Managing Oneself may seem obvious, if not elementary, compared to the changes and challenges discussed in the earlier chapters. And the answers may seem to be self-evident to the point of appearing naive. To be sure, many topics in the earlier chapters—for example, Being a Change Leader or some of the Information Challenges—are far more complex and require more advanced and more difficult policies, technologies, methodologies. But most of the new behavior—the new policies, technologies, methodologies—called for in these earlier chapters can be considered EVOLUTIONS.

Managing Oneself is 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 also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us—even of the younger generation—still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.

Knowledge workers, after all, first came into being in any substantial numbers a generation ago. (I coined the term “knowledge worker,” but only thirty years ago, in my 1969 book The Age of Discontinuity.)

But also the shift from manual workers who do as they are being told—either by the task or by the boss—to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. For every existing society, even the most “individualist” one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: Organizations outlive workers, and most people stay put.

Managing Oneself is based on the very opposite realities: Workers are likely to outlive organizations, and the knowledge worker has mobility.

In the United States MOBILITY is accepted. But even in the United States, workers outliving organizations—and with it the need to be prepared for a Second and Different Half of One’s Life—is a revolution for which practically no one is prepared. Nor is any existing institution, for example, the present retirement system. In the rest of the developed world, however, immobility is expected and accepted. It is “stability.”

In Germany, for instance, mobility—until very recently—came to an end with the individual’s reaching age ten or, at the latest, age sixteen. If a child did not enter Gymnasium at age ten, he or she had lost any chance ever to go to the university. And the apprenticeship that the great majority who did not go to the Gymnasium entered at age fifteen or sixteen as a mechanic, a bank clerk, a cook—irrevocably and irreversibly—decided what work the person was going to do the rest of his or her life. Moving from the occupation of one’s apprenticeship into another occupation was simply not done even when not actually forbidden.

The developed society that faces the greatest challenge and will have to make the most difficult changes is the society that has been most successful in the last fifty years: Japan. Japan’s success—and there is no precedent for it in history—very large rested on organized immobility—the immobility of “lifetime employment.” In lifetime employment it is the organization that manages the individual. And it does so, of course, on the assumption that the individual has no choice. The individual is being managed

I very much hope that Japan will find a solution that preserves the social stability, the community—and the social harmony—that lifetime employment provided, and yet creates the mobility that knowledge work and knowledge workers must have. Far more is at stake than Japan’s own society and civic harmony. A Japanese solution would provide a model—for in every country a functioning society does require cohesion. Still, a successful Japan will be a very different Japan.

But so will be every other developed country.

The emergence of the knowledge worker who both can and must manage himself or herself is transforming every society.