by Ray Keating
One of the best things
about writing and researching in your career is that the learning never stops.
This column, which originally ran in Long Island Business News in December
2014, serves up some insights learned from Peter Drucker on managing one’s
career…
An anniversary snuck up on me the other day. It turns out
that 2014 marked a quarter century of my writing on the economy, policy,
business, and more.
That includes being a weekly newspaper columnist for the
now-defunct “New York City Tribune,” then for “Newsday,” and for nearly seven
years now with “Long Island Business News.” Toss in seven-plus years of
teaching in the business school at Dowling College, serving as an economist in
the policy world for nearly two-dozen years, and writing ten books, and I’ve
been at this knowledge worker thing for a long time.
One of the best parts of these gigs is that the process of
learning has never stopped. I always learn when I write. Also, teaching
management classes provides assorted lessons or refreshers for my career. That
occurred this semester as I turned to one of the classic business thinkers of
the past 75 years – Peter Drucker.
Drucker, who died in 2005 at the age of 95, provided
insights on management, in the broadest sense of the word, from the late 1930s
into the twenty-first century. “BusinessWeek” once referred to him as “the man
who invented management.”
Regarding his contributions, the website of the Peter
Drucker Institute sums up: Drucker “predicted many of the major developments of
the late 20th century, including privatization and decentralization, the rise
of Japan to economic world power, the decisive importance of marketing and
innovation, and the emergence of the information society with its necessity of
lifelong learning. In the late 1950s, Drucker coined the term ‘knowledge
worker,’ and he spent the rest of his life examining an age in which an
unprecedented number of people use their brains more than their backs.”
I appreciated Drucker’s plain talk that innovation is just
as much about hard work, persistence, analyzing opportunities and focus, as it
is about inspiration and ingenuity. He wrote about “systematic innovation” and
the “discipline of innovation.” Most people default to innovation being
mysterious and ethereal. But innovation is grounded in the real world; after
all, it is the act of bringing a new or improved product or process to the
marketplace. Drucker summed up, “If diligence, persistence, and commitment are
lacking, talent, ingenuity, and knowledge are of no avail.”
This semester, I introduced students and myself to Drucker’s
Harvard Business Review article “Managing Oneself.” It’s a fascinating piece
focused on managing, developing and preparing yourself in order to stay
“engaged over a 50-year working life.” He offered a systematic process of
assessing your own strengths, preferred working and learning styles, values compared
to the firm’s values, and coming to understand how and where you can make the
best contributions.
Interestingly, though, for both my much younger students and
me, what seemed to hit home was Drucker’s discussion of preparing for and
launching an eventual second or parallel career. He noted that most midlife
crises are about boredom, as even those who are very good at their jobs still
eventually might find a lack of learning, contribution or challenge, despite
having another 20-25 years of work ahead.
The students were interested in Drucker’s advice to start
preparing for a second career long before entering the second half of your
career. I found it interesting that I already had undertaken this process when
I started writing novels a few years ago. The students became interested in
planning ahead, while I reflected on managing in the midst of the
second/parallel career.
I’ve always taught students that your career will be more
satisfying if you think of yourself as an entrepreneur, that you are your own
small business. Drucker put it just a bit different: “In effect, managing
oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief
executive officer.” Thinking this way offers a different perspective on your
career, whether you own a business or have one boss. As your own CEO or small
business, you both have control and must work to make your customers (such as
your boss) happy. That’s business, including managing yourself.
______________
Mr. Keating is an
economist and novelist who writes on a wide range of topics. His Pastor Stephen
Grant novels have received considerable acclaim, including The River: A Pastor
Stephen Grant Novel being a finalist for KFUO radio’s Book of the Year 2014,
and Murderer’s Row: A Pastor Stephen Grant Novel winning for Book of the Year
2015.
The Pastor Stephen
Grant Novels are available at Amazon…
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