MANAGE YOURSELF, THAN YOUR COMPANY: Set an example
[Lecture by Peter Drucker on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the IEDC]
The first important Thing: Manage yourself
All management books, including those I have written, focus on managing other people. But you cannot manage other people unless you manage yourself first.
The most crucial and vital resource you have as an executive and as a manager is yourself; so, the first thing to say about the development of a country like yours, or like those represented in this room today is: development. This is a very general term. Development is, foremost, dependent on how much you get out of the resource that is truly under your own command and control, namely: yourself. When I look at all the organizations I have work with over a long life, there is difference between the successful ones and the great majority who are, at best, mediocre. The difference is that the people who are running the successful ones manage themselves. They know their strengths – and it is amazing how few people really know what they are good at. You do not know it unless you work at finding out what you are good at.
Most of the people I know who have done outstanding job, and the number is not very large, have systematically organized finding out what they are really good at. You do it, by the way, by using a very old method which has nothing to do with modern management and which goes back thousands of years. Whenever you so something of significance, whenever you are making an important decisions about people (that is your most important decision), usually you write down what you expect the result would be, and nine months or a year later, you look at it. And then you will see very, very soon what you are good at. You will see very, very soon where you need to learn, where you need to improve; and you can also see very, very soon where you are simply not gifted. There are no universal geniuses, but a person can be very good – I have seen people who can just look at a market and they understand it. They do not need any tool or research. But, they are very often hopeless when it comes to managing people, so find out what you are really good at, and than make sure you place yourself where your strengths can produce results. Yes, one has to work at overcoming weaknesses. But even if you work very hard and you manage to become responsibly competent in area in which you are really not gifted, you are not going to be a top producer. You are top producer if you put yourself where your strengths are, and if you work on developing your strengths.
The second thing is to pay a great deal of attention to how and where you place other people. Again, place people where their strengths can produce results. When you look at organization, everybody has access to the same materials. What differentiates a successful organization from most others is the way they place their people. It is not only that they keep on developing their people, but first place them where the strengths of the people can produce results and where their weaknesses are irrelevant. And those are the first things to say that make the difference between being an outstanding performer and being mediocre or worst.
And one part, a very important part, and one cannot stress it enough in a country like yours which is trying to catch up and does not have too much time – you have maybe ten years – is to realize that the people at the top set an example. Your company may be very small, quite unimportant, but within small company you, the executive, are exceedingly visible. Most management is by an example, and whenever you look at truly outstanding organizations there is one, very rarely more than one - maybe two, maybe even three – but I have yet to see one that has more people who set an example. And that also is tremendously convincing. Here is an executive who performs and then people who know they can do it, too. Perhaps it is the most important area, especially in a new and small, and growing organization, and in a country like yours which has to do so many things at the same time, because you have to catch up with most of the history of this century.
Ethics – The Mirror Test
This most important area may be the area of personal behavior, the quality area of ethics. I am always asked what I mean by that. The answer is very, very old one; it goes back to the ancient Greeks. I call it the mirror test. Every morning when you look at in the mirror, when you shave yourself or when you put on your lipstick: is the person you see in the mirror the person you want to see? Do you want to be the kind of person you see? Maybe “ashamed” is too strong: are you uneasy because you cut corners, because you break your promises, because you bribe, because you do something for immediate short-term benefits? Are you that kind of person? Do you want to see, in the mirror, what you actually see? That is the mirror test and it is vital, simply because you may be able too fool people outside your organization, but you cannot fool people inside your organization; and, as you behave, they will too. Well, perhaps not emulate you, but if you give the wrong example, you send the wrong signals. You will corrupt the whole organization. So management does not begin with the environment, and it does not begin with the company’s so-called competencies; it begins with managing yourself for performance, and setting an example, and that is perhaps the most important thing one can say.
After you have forced yourself to behave in the way you expect, you want to appear in the mirror; and especially after you have worked hard on putting the people in your organization where their strengths can really perform and where the things they do not have really don’t count. It does not really count that this person is not technically superior if he or she is in a position where there are no technical requirements, but that you have person who really knows how to work with people. Let me say that I do not think anybody who does not know how to do this, can learn it. Yes, if you know how to do it, you can greatly improve, you can acquire techniques, you can learn this or that important tool, but you have to start off with an ability. Ability is even a wrong word; you need a basic attitude of respect for people, and interest in people. I am not referring to “be nice”.
The boss from whom I learned the most, was editor-in-chief of a newspaper at which I have just started, and I do not think I made a very good career of it. I do not think that in four years of working with him he ever said on word of praise; yet he respected my work. He could be very nasty and he was: he forced me to write and re-write, and I had incredible respect for him because he applied the same discipline for himself. However, he was not a friend; he was not a nice person, he was distant, and aloof and demanding, but he knew how to get people to perform. And so the first thing to do is to manage yourself.
The Second Important Thing: Spend More Time Outside of
the Company
The second thing to remember is to spend enough time and effort on the outside of your business. A great danger in an organization, and not only a big one, is that you disappear in it, it absorbs you, that you spent all your time, energy and ability on internal problems.
Not all results of an organization and especially of the business are on the outside. And not only where the customers are, also where non-consumers are. Even if you are dominant business in your filed, you very rarely have more than 1/3 of the market, which means that 2/3 of potential customers do not by from you. You may know a great deal about your customers and pay a great deal of attention to them; and maybe you are in the business in which there is only handful of customers for that special machine you make, and so you know your customers and you are in touch with them. One of the advantages of medium-sized or small business is that you can say you know your customers. In big business you do not. You have no reports. And yet, 2/3 of the market does not buy from you and you should make sure that you have enough time to look at these non-customers. Why do they really not buy from us? What are their values, what are their expectations?
That is not the reason. The main reason is that change practically always starts with the non-customers.
What I mean is
this: in the last 30 years major industries has got into trouble, and I do not
have to tell you have to tell you that the major industries of the 1950’s and
1960s are universally in trouble: the automobile industry, the commercial banks
and the big steel companies. Almost all of the industries that dominated the
industrial landscape in the developed countries in the 1950s and 1960s are
today on the defensive, and in every single case the change started on the
outside, amongst the non-customers and they are in trouble to a large extent.
Department stores, not yet in Europe, but present in the
So the first thing to do is make sure you are close enough to the outside that you do not have to depend on reports. The best example I know: many years ago, a man built one of the world’s largest major business, the first business that really took advantage of the great change of the medicine, when the practice of medicine shifted from the individual practitioner to the hospital (that happened after the Second World War in the developed countries). This man saw this first, and built a very big and successful business on it. There is a simple rule: every executive in that company from its beginnings, when it was very small, to its being a huge big multinational, every executive spent four weeks – two times two – outside company.
Whenever a salesman went on vacation, an executive took his or her place for two weeks, twice a year, and called on customers and sold to customers and introduced new products into the hospital market. It is because he had reports (everybody had the same reports), but because it spent some time with the hospital administrator, who actually made the buying decisions. And so: make sure you know the market.
The Third Important Thing: What are the Strengths of
Your Company?
…
(изд. IEDC –
No comments:
Post a Comment