Managing Oneself: Revolution in Society
Managing oneself is based on these realities: Workers are likely to outlive organizations, and the knowledge worker has mobility.
Managing oneself is a REVOLUTION in human affairs. It requires new and unprecedented things from the individual, and especially from the knowledge worker. For, in effect, it demands that each knowledge worker think and behave as a chief executive officer. It also requires an almost 180-degree change in the knowledge workers’ thoughts and actions from what most of us still take for granted as the way to think and the way to act.
The shift from manual workers who do as they are being told —either by the task or by the boss —to knowledge workers who have to manage themselves profoundly challenges social structure. For every existing society, even the most “individualist” one, takes two things for granted, if only subconsciously: Organizations outlive workers, and most people stay put. Managing oneself is based on the very opposite realities. In the United States MOBILITY is accepted. But even in the United States, workers outliving organizations—and with it the need to be prepared for a second and different half of one’s life—is a revolution for which practically no one is prepared. Nor is any existing institution, for example, the present retirement system.
ACTION POINT: Begin thinking of a second career you find fulfilling. List areas of work that interest you, including that of a volunteer in a nonprofit organization.
Managing Oneself: Work Relationships
Organizations are built on trust, and trust is built on communication and mutual understanding.
Just as it is important for you to know your own strengths, work styles, and values, it is also important that you learn the strengths, work styles, and values of the people around you. Each person is an individual, and there are likely to be great differences between yourself and others. But such differences do not matter. What does matter is whether everyone performs. Consistent group performance can be achieved only if each person within the group is able to perform as an individual. And to help make this happen, you must build on other people’s strengths, other people’s work styles, and other people’s values.
Once you have identified your strengths, work style, and values, as well as what your contribution should be, you must then consider who else needs to know about it. Everyone who depends on you and on whom you depend needs to know this information about how you work. Since communication is a two-way process, you should feel comfortable asking your coworkers to think through and define their own strengths, work styles, and values.
ACTION POINT: List the people who depend upon your contributions and the specific contribution each person requires. List those people on whom you depend and the contributions you require from each person. Inform both groups and be sure each person is served properly, including you.
“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”
Ray Bradbury
“Create with the heart; build with the mind.”
Criss Jami
“Proportion is the heart of beauty.”
Ken Follett
“It’s creepy, but here we are, the Pilgrims, the crackpots of our time, trying to establish our own alternate reality. To build a world out of rocks and chaos.
What it’s going to be, I don’t know.
Even after all that rushing around, where we’ve ended up is the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
And maybe knowing isn’t the point.
Where we’re standing right now, in the ruins in the dark, what we build could be anything.”
Chuck Palahniuk
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“The palace started as a single vaulted room and grew in proportion to my despair. It began as an exercise to keep my mind from its melancholy, then it became a dream and a necessity. . . . I built a temple in my head. . . . Its hallways were as lofty as a cathedral, and the arch of each window as supple as a bow. Its corridors were the passages of my own brain.”
Lisa St. Aubin de Terán
“Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.”
Charles F. Lummis
“The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.”
Jared Diamond, Collapse
“The thin line between life and death is still under construction.”
Santosh Kalwar
“Astray from a deep sleep chronic as I write by phonics, like insomnia I will always live the onyx night for revealing, and, upon it, still I’ll steal the bright light of day right away just to keep building at speeds hypersonic.”
Criss Jami
“Your life success is well designed by the mental transformation you experience. That mental transformation guides you to construct powerful decisions. You can’t live life so well without mental make-ups.”
Israelmore Ayivor
“God used the element of faith to construct the earth and its inhabitants. Whatever he said, it came to pass, then dropped these elements in us to say whatever we want to also come to pass, but sin and disbelieve has murdered the faith in us and need to be ressurected by purity and strong will power.”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“He’d discovered that he liked houses. Maybe mostly because they were understandable. They could be calculated and drawn on paper. They did not leak if they were made water tight, they did not collapse if they were properly supported. Houses were fair, they gave you what you deserved. Which, unfortunately, was more than one could say about people.”
Fredrik Backman
“Construction is the art of making a meaningful whole out of many parts. Buildings are witnesses to the human ability to construct concrete things. I believe that the real core of all architectural work lies in the act of construction. At the point in time concrete materials are assembled and erected, the architecture we have been looking for becomes part of the real world.”
Peter Zumthor
“You cannot expect a man to love you, but not because of your body or physical construction. It is like giving a man the option between choosing you and a monkey.”
M.F. Moonzajer
“Develop your leaders into a competitive advantage. Reconnect your leader-power to success.”
Gene Morton
“Personal branding for dream fulfillment often comes like the process of building castles. You have to be attracted to the construction work carefully, consistently and passionately over time.”
Israelmore Ayivor
“… every hypothesis is a construction, and because of this it is an authentic theory. In so far as they merit that exigent name, ideas are never a mere reception of presumed realities, but they are constructions of possibilities; therefore they are pure bits of imagination, or fine ideas of our own…”
José Ortega y Gasset
“Interest in temperament as an individual difference dimension of importance in one’s behavior leads to reanalysis of both theoretical and methodological considerations relating to the construct.”
Moutasem Algharati