A Social Ecologist
For me the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization.
I consider myself a “social ecologist,” concerned with man’s man-made environment the way the natural ecologist studies the biological environment. The term “social ecology” is my own coinage. But the discipline itself boasts and old and distinguished lineage. Its greatest document is Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. But no one is as close to me in temperament, concepts, and approach as the mid-Victorian Englishman Walter Bagehot. Living (as I have) in an age of great social change, Bagehot first saw the emergence of new institutions: civil service and cabinet government, as cores of a functioning democracy, and banking as the center of a functioning economy.
A hundred years after Bagehot, I was first to identify management as the new social institution of the emerging society of organizations and, a little later, to spot the emergence of knowledge as the new central resource, and knowledge workers as the new ruling class of a society that is not only “postindustrial” but postsocialist and increasingly, postcapitalist. As it had been for Bagehot, for me too the tension between the need for continuity and the need for innovation and change was central to society and civilization. Thus, I know what Bagehot meant when he said that he saw himself sometimes as a liberal Conservative and sometimes as a conservative Liberal but never as a “conservative Conservative” or a “liberal Liberal.”
The Discipline of Management
If you can’t replicate something because you don’t understand it, then it really hasn’t been invented; it’s only been done.
When I published The Practice of Management, fifty years ago, that book made it possible for people to learn how to manage, something that up until then only a few geniuses seemed to be able to do, and nobody could replicate it.
When I came into management, a lot of it had come out of the field of engineering. And a lot of it had come out of accounting. And some of it came out of psychology. And some more came out of labor relations. Each of those fields was considered separate, and each of them, by itself, was ineffectual. You can’t do carpentry, you know, if you have only a saw, or only a hammer, or if you have never heard of a pair of pliers. It’s when you put all of those tools into one kit that you invent. That’s what I did in large part in The Practice of Management. I made a discipline of it.
Feedback: Key to Continuous Learning
To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do – are the keys to continuous learning.
Whenever a Jesuit priest or a Calvinist pastor does anything of significance (for instance, making a key decision), he is expected to write down what results he anticipates. Nine months later, he then feeds back from the actual results to these anticipations. This very soon shows him what he did well and what his strengths are. It also shows him what he has to learn and what habits he has to change. Finally it shows him what he is not gifted for and cannot do well. I have followed this method myself, now for fifty years. It brings out what one’s strengths are – and this is the most important thing an individual can know about himself or herself. It brings out where improvement is needed and what kind of improvement is needed. Finally, it brings out what an individual cannot do and therefore should not even try to do. To know one’s strengths, to know how to improve them, and to know what one cannot do – they are the keys to continuous learning.
Reinvent Yourself
Knowledge people must take responsibility for their own development and placement.
In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill. Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic – skills change very, very slowly. Knowledge, however, changes itself. It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly. A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.
This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time. People change over such a long time span. They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore, with a need to “revitalize.” If you talk of fifty years of working life – and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm – you have to reinvent yourself. You have to make something different out yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy.