Managing Oneself

Managing Oneself

1. The Idea in brief:

   • Living in an age of unprecedented opportunity
     • If you got ambition, drive, and smarts, you can rise to the top of your chosen profession.
     • Companies today aren't managing their knowledge worlers' careers.
   • It's up to you to carve out your place in the work world and know when to change course.
   • You need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself.
   • Only when you operate from a combination of your strengths and self-knowledge can you achieve true excellence.

2. What are my strengths?

   • The only way to discover your strenghts is through feedback analysis.
     • Several implications for action follow from feedback analysis.
       • Concentrate on your strengths
       • Put yourself where your strengths can produce results
   • Work on improving your strengths.
     • Analysis will rapidly show where you need to improve your skills or acquiere new ones.
   • Discover your intelectual arrogance
     • Overcome it
     • Feedback reveal when the problema is a lack of manners.
     • Comparing your expectations with your results also indicates what not to do.
       • One should waste as Little effort as posible on improving áreas of low competence.
       • It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity tan it takes to improv from first-rate performance to excelence.

3. How Do I Perform?

   • It's a matter of personality
   • Just as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways that they best perform.
   • A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs.
   • Am I a reader or a listener?
     • Few listeners can be made, or can make themselves, into competent readers and vice versa.
   • How do I learn?
     • Do not try to change yourself- you are unlikely to succeed.
     • Work hard in the way you perform.
     • Try not to take on work you cannot perfor, or will only perform poorly.

4. Where are my values?

   • To Work in an organization whose value system is unacceptable or incompatible with one's own, condemns a person both to frustration and to nonperformance.
   • TO be effective in an organization, a person's values must be compatible with the organization's values.
     • They do not need to be the same, but they must be close enough to coexist.

5. Where do I belong?

   • Highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are past their mid-twenties.
   • The person who has learned that he or she doesn't perform well in a big organization should have learned to say no to a position in one.
   • Succesful careers are not planned.
     • They develop when people are prepared for opportunities because they know their strenghts, their method of work, and their values.