I am my own manager

I am not talking about managing self. What I mean is

I am my own CEO

"Each of us is a CEO" managing his own career, says Peter F Drucker on the final pages of The Definitive Drucker. The book is based on interviews Elisabeth Haas Edersheim had with Peter Drucker during the last years of his life. It can be called, as is printed on the cover “Final Advice from the Father of Modern Management”. When all the pieces started to fit together for this blog, his final advice became my first advice.

To become your own CEO you need the same three characteristics as a CEO
1) Maintaining broad field of vision requires having a sense of where you are going and what you are building
2) leaving your thumbprint on the organizational personality by knowing yourself and what gives you passion
3) influence others and be influenced by them

My intention in this blog is to maintain a broad field of vision and cover many aspects of management. I have a clear idea of where I am going and what I am building, but you have to wait a couple more posts before I get to my strategy.

I got the original idea for this blog last year, January 13 2007, to be precise. I read a book called Good Luck by Alex Rovira and Fernando Trias de Bes. I realized then that I need to act according to the

Fifth Rule of Good Luck:
If you postpone the creation of new conditions, Good Luck never arrives.
Creating new conditions is sometimes hard work, but ... do it today!

But only when I realized that I also need to be my own CEO many things became crystal clear. I will cover topics listed on the first post, Original Idea, and many other topics one by one.

My next post will be about the organization – if I am my own CEO, what is my organization? Do I leave a thumbprint on my organization personality by knowing myself and knowing what gives me passion? After all, I am not a CEO of any company, just a middle manager managing my own career.

And for the last characteristics I need to interact with you, hopefully influencing you and definitely being influenced by you if you give me comments. Which I hope you would give to my posts.

Are you managing your own career?

Are you actively creating conditions for Good Luck?

Being active gives better results than just waiting for something to happen.

Another year has passed

A year has passed since I decided to start this blog. A year ago I though of this as a project, but it was not. It's a hobby. A year ago I was thinking of making a project plan for this blog, but how could I do a project plan for a hobby? And that's what has been taking all this time.

But I have not forgotten the idea. How could I forget a hobby?

Actually, this was just another year that passed. The hobby started around April 8, 1997 when a made a summary of Nonaka's article The Knowledge-Creating Company in Harvard Business Review. Since then I have been collecting these best practices. For some years now I have been planning to put them on paper. I decided to document them here virtually instead. They are usefull in my work, and I am more than happy if somebody else finds them usefull in his/her work also.

I am not worried at all about the slowness of the start. During this year I have collected more best practices and this week I finally realized how all the pieces fit togehter. Besides, one of my favorite novelist, Milan Kundera in his novel Slowness says

There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.

I may have been slow, but I have had my sensors out and I remember more of what I have read. My concious became clean when I realized this is part of my life long learning - not a project, and thus there is no schedule and there are no dead lines!

Nevertheless I intend to post more frequently in the future.