Picking back up some great chapters from the _Effective Executive_.
“Know your strengths” because in the knowledge economy the worker must manage themself. You will outlast your company/job by 3x.
At Knotable recently, we raised some topics on how “we”
– manage our to do lists
– work the items
– delegate tasks and manage the dev teams
– and shift macro modes between “awesome” cycles and “broken” cycles.
The messages from Drucker are — write down what you wish to achieve then evaluate how you did. Are you delivering? You can judge yourself.
From that identify what you do well or pretty well – do more of it. Find what you suck at and avoid it. Get it out of your life. Don’t even risk to crash and burn there.
This isn’t a choice about “content” but about “process”. Which types of things are you good at?
Drucker sets it up as
– do you prefer reading or listening?
– to learn something do you do it by taking notes or writing out an approach or telling someone your ideas or just rehearsing/doing?
– teamwork or loner?
– crunch time or structured work plan?
– make decisions rapidly or advise on them with care and nuance?
This is me:
– read. Impatient to listen
– doing to learn. Prefer it to studying.
– teamwork. Delegation and coordination preferred to lengthy preparation.
– crunch time is fine with me. Don’t like schedules.
– decide things.
Now this works for me but if you are different there is a way to make it work for you. It just means you need to find certain situations and avoid others — crashing servers require crunch time decisions. Planning a new product family requires solo study and patience.