HOW TO BOUNCE BACK FROM ADVERSITY ?
Psychological resilence is the capacity to respond quickly and constructively to crises. But resilence can be hard to muster for many reasons. Fear, anger and confusion can paralyse us after a severe setback. Assigning blame rather than generating solutions is an all-too-human tendency. Worse yet, those to whom we turn for counsel may offer us exactly the wrong kind of advice.
Decades of research in psychology, on topics including hardiness, learned helplessness, coping and the correlation between cognitive style and health, confirms that each of us has a distinct, consistent pattern of thinking about life’s twists and turns a pattern of which most of us are largely unaware. It may be an unconscious reflex to look backward from traumatic incidents to explain what just happened. Such analysis can be useful, certainly but only up to the point where strong negative emotions start to prevent our moving on.
We believe that managers can build high levels of reslience in themselves and their teams by taking charge of how they think about adversity. Resilent managers move quickly from analysis to a plan of action (and action). After the onset of adversity, they shift from cause-oriented thinking to response-oriented thinking and their focus is strictly forward.
When adversity strikes:
Most of us go with our gut when something bad happens. Deeply ingrained habits and beliefs sap our energy and keep us from acting constructively. People commonly fall into one of two emotional traps. One is deflation. Someone who has marched steadily through a string of success can easily come to feel like a hero, able to fix any problem singlehandedly. A traumatic event can snap that person back to reality. Even for the less heroic among us, adversity can touch off intense bursts of negative emotion as if a dark cloud had settled behind our eyes, as one manager described it. We may feel disappointed in ourselves or others, mistreated and dispirited, even besieged.
The other emotional trap is victimization. Many of us assume the role of a helpless bystander in the face of an adverse event. “Those people” have put us in an unfortunate position, we tell ourselves (and others) again and again. We dismiss both criticism and helpful suggestions from others and go out of our way to affirm that we are right, everyone else is wrong, and no one understands us. Meanwhile, self-doubt may creep in, making us feel hopelessly constrained by circumstances.
Highly accomplished managers are confronting, in rapid succession, challenges the likes of which they have never seen before a world wide economic crisis, the globalization of business, the rise of new technologies, deep; demograp;hic shifts. Feeling discouraged and helpless, they turn away from the problem and unfortunately, from people who might be able to help. Even if these managers went to their bosses for guidance, they’d most likely receive inadequate coaching. That is because most supervisors, riding their own long wave of hard-won successes, lack the empathy to intervene effectively. They may not know how to counsel direct reports they feel are not quite as talented as they were at escaping the shadow of defeat. They may be so well accustomed to handling adversity in ways that minimize their psychological stress that they don’t recognize their own bad habits.
THE CAPACITY FOR RESILENCE:
Independent studies in psychology and our own observations suggest that the ability to bounce back from adversity hinges on uncovering and untangling one’s implicit beliefs about it and shifting how one responds.
Most of us, when we experience difficult episode, make quick assumptions about its causes, magnitude, consequences and duration. We instantly decide, for example, whether it was inevitable, a function of forces beyond our control, or whether we could somehow have prevented it. Managers need to shift from this kind of reflexive thinking to “active” thinking about how best to respond, asking themselves what aspects they can control, what impact they can have, and how the breadth and duration of the crisis might be contained. Three types of questions can help them make this shift.
Specifying questions help managers identify ways to intervene; the more specific the answers, the better. Visualising questions help shift their attention away from the adverse event and toward a more positive outcome. Collaborating questions push them to reach out to others – not a affirmation or commiseration but for joint problem solving. Each type of question can clarify each of the four lenses of resilent thinking.
Taken together, the four sets make up the reslience regimen.
A CHANGE IN MIND-SET:
To strengthen their resilence, managers need to shift from reflexive, cause-oriented thinking to active, response-oriented thinking.
Answering the questions:
CAUSE ORIENTED THINKING
RESPONSE ORIENTED THINKING
CONTROL: - was this adverse event inevitable, or could I have prevented it ?
What features of the situation can I (even potentially) improve ?
IMPACT: Did I cause the adverse event, or did it result from external forces ?
What sort of positive impact can I personally have on what happens next ?
BREADTH: Is the underlying cause of this event specific to it or more widespread ?
How can I contain the negatives sof the situation and generate currently unseen positives ?
DURATION: Is the underlying cause of this event enduring or temporary ?
What can I do begin addressing the problem now ?
Al though the question sets offer a useful framework for refraining manager’s responses, simply knowing what to ask is not enough. You won’t become more resilent simply because you have read this far and have made a mental note to pull these questions the next time a destabilizing difficulty strikes. To strengthen your capacity for resilence, you need to internalize the questions by following two simple precepts:
WRITE DOWN THE ANSWERS:
Various studies on stress and coping with trauma demonstrate that the act of writing about difficult episodes can enhance an individual’s emotional and physical well-being. Indeed, writing offers people command over an adverse situation in a way that merely thinking about it does not. Instead of ruminating about events, letting them interrupt your work, you will have solutions in the making.
Under ongoing duress, executives’ capacity for resilence is critical to to maintaining their mental and physical health. Paradoxically, however, buildihg reslience is best down precisely when times are most difficult when we face the most upending challenges, when we are at the greatest risk of misfiring with our reactions, when we are blindest to the opportunities presented. All the more reason, then, to use the reslience regimen to tamp down unproductive responses to adversity, replace negatively with creativity and resourcefulness and get things done despite real or perceived obstacles.
::::::::::::::
Sunday, August 22, 2010
TOWARDS A POSITIVE WORK-LIFE BALANCE
TOWARDS A POSITIVE WORK-LIFE BALANCE
“DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT, DECIDE WHAT YOU ARE WILLING TO EXCHANGE FOR IT. ESTABLISH YOUR PRIORITIES AND GO TO WORK” – H L HUNT
A positive “Work Life Balance” is a term that refers to an individual’s perception of the degree to which she is experiencing positive relationships between work and family, where the relationships are viewed as compatible and at equilibrium with each other. Individual condition is like a fulcrum shifting weights of time and energy allocation between work and family life, the term, “work-family-balance”, provides a metaphor to contest the historical belief that work and family relationships can often be competing, at odds, and conflicting.
There is no doubt that finding a balance between work and family in today’s competitive work environment is not an easy task. Not very long back, we were terming work-life balance as a “Western” problem and India would never be affected by it. But the employees in the country are now struggling with the inevitable effect of all work and no play. As an individual, on the one hand, the drive is to keep up with the workload, to go up the corporate ladder and prove oneself. While on the other side it is the demand for quality time with family and friends, which ultimately results in fatigue, missed milestones, frustration and sense of incompleteness. For the ‘We want it all” generation, this delicate see-saw to reduce stress and maintain harmony is an ongoing challenge.
So whether the problem is too much focus on work or too little, the feeling that our work life and personal life are not jelling together creates stress and its harmful side effects. Ultimately, work-life balance depends on individual choices. It requires each employee to examine one’s priorities and set boundaries. Above all, it is the awareness that balance does not mean doing everything, everytime.
Traditionally, researchers have assumed a “win-lose” relationship between work and family and focused on “work-family-conflict”, based on the belief that individuals have limited time and resources to allocate to their many life roles. Sometime, it is difficult for the individual to match both work and family life and thus crating an inter-role conflict where work and family roles are incompatible and seem as competing for an individual’s time, energy, and behaviours on and off the job.
(MORAL: EVEN IF YOU HAVE NOTHING, YOU CAN GET ANYTHING. BUT YOUR ATTITUDE AND APPROACH SHOULD BE POSITIVE)
“DECIDE WHAT YOU WANT, DECIDE WHAT YOU ARE WILLING TO EXCHANGE FOR IT. ESTABLISH YOUR PRIORITIES AND GO TO WORK” – H L HUNT
A positive “Work Life Balance” is a term that refers to an individual’s perception of the degree to which she is experiencing positive relationships between work and family, where the relationships are viewed as compatible and at equilibrium with each other. Individual condition is like a fulcrum shifting weights of time and energy allocation between work and family life, the term, “work-family-balance”, provides a metaphor to contest the historical belief that work and family relationships can often be competing, at odds, and conflicting.
There is no doubt that finding a balance between work and family in today’s competitive work environment is not an easy task. Not very long back, we were terming work-life balance as a “Western” problem and India would never be affected by it. But the employees in the country are now struggling with the inevitable effect of all work and no play. As an individual, on the one hand, the drive is to keep up with the workload, to go up the corporate ladder and prove oneself. While on the other side it is the demand for quality time with family and friends, which ultimately results in fatigue, missed milestones, frustration and sense of incompleteness. For the ‘We want it all” generation, this delicate see-saw to reduce stress and maintain harmony is an ongoing challenge.
So whether the problem is too much focus on work or too little, the feeling that our work life and personal life are not jelling together creates stress and its harmful side effects. Ultimately, work-life balance depends on individual choices. It requires each employee to examine one’s priorities and set boundaries. Above all, it is the awareness that balance does not mean doing everything, everytime.
Traditionally, researchers have assumed a “win-lose” relationship between work and family and focused on “work-family-conflict”, based on the belief that individuals have limited time and resources to allocate to their many life roles. Sometime, it is difficult for the individual to match both work and family life and thus crating an inter-role conflict where work and family roles are incompatible and seem as competing for an individual’s time, energy, and behaviours on and off the job.
(MORAL: EVEN IF YOU HAVE NOTHING, YOU CAN GET ANYTHING. BUT YOUR ATTITUDE AND APPROACH SHOULD BE POSITIVE)
POSITIVE APPROACH
POSITIVE APPROACH
Father: I want you to marry a girl of my choice
Son: I will choose my own bride
Father: But the girl is Brad Gates’ daughter
Son: Well, in that case, OK
Next day father approaches Brad Gates
Father: I have husband for your daughter
Gates: But my daughter is too young to marry
Father: But this young man is a Vice President of the World Development Bank
Gates: Ah, in that case, OK
Finally father goes to se the President of the World Development Bank
Father: I have a young man to be recommended as a Vice President
President: But I already have more Vice Presidents than I need
Father: But this young man is Brad Gates’ Son-in-law
President: Ah, in that case.. OK
This is how business is done..
(MORAL: EVEN IF YOU HAVE NOTHING, YOU CAN GET ANYTHING. BUT YOUR ATTITUDE AND APPROACH SHOULD BE POSITIVE)
Father: I want you to marry a girl of my choice
Son: I will choose my own bride
Father: But the girl is Brad Gates’ daughter
Son: Well, in that case, OK
Next day father approaches Brad Gates
Father: I have husband for your daughter
Gates: But my daughter is too young to marry
Father: But this young man is a Vice President of the World Development Bank
Gates: Ah, in that case, OK
Finally father goes to se the President of the World Development Bank
Father: I have a young man to be recommended as a Vice President
President: But I already have more Vice Presidents than I need
Father: But this young man is Brad Gates’ Son-in-law
President: Ah, in that case.. OK
This is how business is done..
(MORAL: EVEN IF YOU HAVE NOTHING, YOU CAN GET ANYTHING. BUT YOUR ATTITUDE AND APPROACH SHOULD BE POSITIVE)
TEN BASIC PERSONALITY STYLES
TEN BASIC PERSONALITY STYLES
Sl.No.
Personality style type
Probable behaviours
01
The Driver
The person in motion, the “workaholic” and over-achiever who nurses the fear that he is worthless
02
The controller
The person who dislikes surprises, spontaneity and does not show his feelings because all of these “human” qualities are often uncontrollable and ungodlike
03
The Gentler
The person who feels he is entitled to everything in life and everyone around him. Thus he actively or passively puts others in his services to help him get what he wants
04
The Aginner
The person who actively or passively opposes everything that life demands of him. Rather than offering positive alternative actions or ideas, he endeavours to get revenge or put down the other
05
The Victim
The person who innocently or actively p;ursues the vocation of “disaster chaser”. Everything “happens” to this individual
06
The martyr
The person who pursues the vocation of “injustice collector and who is ready to die for a cause.”He may openly or privately endure suffering
07
The inadequate one
The person who acts as though everything he touches or does will self-destruct. Thus, he is sure to fall when given a responsibility and usually ends up putting others into his service. An underachiever
08
The excitement seeker
The person who despises routine and seeks sout the novel experiences in life. He endeavours to stimulate excitement when life appears to be dull. Alone or in league with others, he will engage in spontaneous and often senseless behaviours. Sometimes, these behaviours are unprovoked crimes against property or persons
09
The Right one
The person who elevates himself above others whom he arranges to perceive as being in the wrong. He avoids error like the plague and will rationalize his way out of an actual error, convincing you that you are wronger than he is
10
The good one
The person who constantly lives by higher moral standards than others. He cannot forgive or forget and constantly blames and reminds you of your shortcomings
++++++++++
Sl.No.
Personality style type
Probable behaviours
01
The Driver
The person in motion, the “workaholic” and over-achiever who nurses the fear that he is worthless
02
The controller
The person who dislikes surprises, spontaneity and does not show his feelings because all of these “human” qualities are often uncontrollable and ungodlike
03
The Gentler
The person who feels he is entitled to everything in life and everyone around him. Thus he actively or passively puts others in his services to help him get what he wants
04
The Aginner
The person who actively or passively opposes everything that life demands of him. Rather than offering positive alternative actions or ideas, he endeavours to get revenge or put down the other
05
The Victim
The person who innocently or actively p;ursues the vocation of “disaster chaser”. Everything “happens” to this individual
06
The martyr
The person who pursues the vocation of “injustice collector and who is ready to die for a cause.”He may openly or privately endure suffering
07
The inadequate one
The person who acts as though everything he touches or does will self-destruct. Thus, he is sure to fall when given a responsibility and usually ends up putting others into his service. An underachiever
08
The excitement seeker
The person who despises routine and seeks sout the novel experiences in life. He endeavours to stimulate excitement when life appears to be dull. Alone or in league with others, he will engage in spontaneous and often senseless behaviours. Sometimes, these behaviours are unprovoked crimes against property or persons
09
The Right one
The person who elevates himself above others whom he arranges to perceive as being in the wrong. He avoids error like the plague and will rationalize his way out of an actual error, convincing you that you are wronger than he is
10
The good one
The person who constantly lives by higher moral standards than others. He cannot forgive or forget and constantly blames and reminds you of your shortcomings
++++++++++
WHY READ PETER DRUCKER ?
WHY READ PETER DRUCKER ?
“Because a manager can profit both from the ideas and from the discipline of mind by which they are formulated – Alan M. Kantrove”
Mention the name of Peter Drucker and many an ear in the business forest stands up straight. Over the years little of concern to bysiness has fallen outside the extraordinary range of his interests, and few of those interests have escaped thoughtful, often classic exposition in his six-foot shelf of articles and books.
Such productivity is itself a professional achievement of the first order. Add to it, however, Drucker’s countless appearances in executive seminars, lecture halls, conference rooms, and classrooms; his extensive labors as a consultant; and his facility for expressing complex ideas simply and elegantly. No wonder the mention of Peter Drucker commonly guarantees attention. People listen because they respect the authority of experience – distilled, analysed, articulate and are eager to profit by it.
There are those, of course, who do not listen so attentively to Drucker. Some, especially within the academy, think him more journalist than scholar and more glib generaliser than journalist. They slight his research as no research at all and his ideas on management as unstructured and (worst sin of all) unsystematic. To their minds Drucker is an armchair philosopher who lacks practical credentials as a doer.
At one extreme they believe him neither interested nor competent on the myriad details of day-to-day business operations and therefore question the authority his judgments regularly carry.
At the other extreme Drucker’s most attentive followers, like those of many a populare thinker, grant him too much. Out-of-context snippets from his writings or conversations often app;ear in support or conversations often appear in support of contentions that he himself does not endorse. Similarly, overly ardent disciples reduce the complexity of his thought to a handful of canomical ideas that, in their doctrinaire simplicity, do violence to the original.
In point of fact, Drucker’s works lend themselves to these excesses of reaction. By relying in places on such suggestive – but incompletely wrought notions as the “contribution coefficient”. Drucker offers fertile ground for scholarly naysaying. Conversely, by striving for a pithy, ep;igrammatical style, he often plays into the hands of those who are too easily satisfied with easy phrases and hall-truths. Indeed, it is rhetorically memorable to assert, as Drucker does, that “most sales training is totally unjustified. At best it makes an incompetent salesman out of a moron”. But it also gives ready encouragement to the cavalier dismissal of a perennially knotty problem.
Sloganeering of either sort, wherever it occurs, is double-edged. Used with care, it allows for a quick, incisive thrust of thought; in the wrong hands, it becomes an effective weapon of simple or fuzzy mindedness.
The influence of ideas:
For the most part, however, Drucker’s books command attention neither for their stock of aphorisms nor for their mastery of technical computation. Ears perk up, rather, to catch the wisdom of Drucker’s animating ideas. So generally, receptive has their audience been and also longlived their influence that many of his ideas have become part and parcel of today’s commonsense understanding of business. As a result, it is snot easy even in retrospect to achieve critical distance from them.
How remarkably familiar has become his vision of modern industrial society as constituted by large-scale organizations. How obvious it now seems to regard business as the representative institution of that society, and how matter-of-fact an exercise it now is to apply to business the same models of analysis appropriate to any social or political institution.
Was there a time when people did not regularly ask of individual businesses their source of legitimate authority, their principle of organization, or their pattern of leadership ? Was there a time when management felt little need to address employees’ concerns for status and function, to fit “knowledge workers” into established structures of decision making and command, or to achieve effective communication in and among managerial levels ?
For that matter, did business ever fail to take seriously the recruitment and development of executives, the proper role of boards of directors, or the special needs of companies at different stages of development ? Did it fail to pay adequate attention to the internal logic of work itself or to those techniques by which managers can become both more efficient and more effective ? Did it ignore such fundamental questions as the nature of the business it was in and of the customers it served ?
Today it is hardly frontpage news, at least within the business community, when some executive offers a defense of profits as an objective measurement of economic performance or as an essential premium against the risks of the future. Nor is it shocking to hear a call for management to think through long-term strategy as well as to set short-term objectives. A voice recommending that business plan for innovation is no longer a voice crying out in the wilderness. That non of this seems novel – that it is all quit commonplace – is prime evidence of Drucker’s pervasive influence, direct or indirect, on managerial thought. By and large these ideas have long since won acceptance as kind of professional folk, wisdom. They have become home truths.
Drucker’s contribution:
To be sure, few of these ideas are original with Drucker. Even fewer have escaped treatment in at least a dozen management texts. Yet there is always a value in reencountering sensible thought sensibly put. But if the substance of his books is neither original nor unique, if what they offer at best is no more or less than the readily paraphrasable content of his thinking, why bother to read them ? Why, in short, read Peter Drucker and not a streamlined digest of his major ideas ?
The answer is simple: Drucker’s real contribution to managerial understanding lies not so much in the cash value of his ideas as in the rigorous activity of mind by which they are formulated. One can learn more and more deeply from watching him think than from studying the content of his thought.
Integration of thought:
Most critics assess the substantive contribution of Drucker’s works to the discipline of professional management. Yet Drucker’s thought is far more valuable for its manner than its matter. First, there is its decidedly integrative quality. To understand essential management tasks. Drucker shows by example that it is necessary to view them in context. One must appreciate the historicaluniverse of traditions and structures out of which they emerged and the culturaluniverse of norms and values in which they participate. One must know about the many forms capitalism has taken over time and the particular strengths of each form. One must be aware of competing economic ideologies and their underlying premises. In short, one must be able to recognize major shifts inhuman aspirations as well as the fixed limits of human adaptation.
Then, too, one must be sensitive to the speed, direction, and logic to those technological and demographic changes that will make the future very different form the present. One must, at the same time, carefully ascertain what in the present will last. Not least, one must supplement an understanding of management with insights from other fields of knowledge, regularly comparing it with the summary experience of other large-scale organizations and different cultures
When brought to bear on even the thorniest of problems, such integrative thinking allows Drucker to identify the key assumptions at issue, to establish their mutual relations, and to evaluate them. Consider, for instance, his lengthy discussion of the curse of bigness in Concept of the Corporation. Here Drucker avoids the needless excesses of those who argue either for or against bigness in business by tracing their operative premise to its root and showing it to be grossly misconceived.
Consciously or not, most opponents of bigness, Drucker finds, are in fact tilting against the windmills of monopoly; its defenders, protecting them. Now, monopoly and bigness are, of course, not the same thing and ought not be confused. But Drucker is able to track the point of issue still further to challenge its historical as well as its logical basis. “This theory of monopoly”, he writes, “which is still widely accepted as gospel truth, rests on the assumption – correct in the eighteenth century – that supply will always be limited, whereas demand will always be unlimited”.
This assumption does not always obtain. It may be true of some, but is not necessarily true of all, historical periods. Because Drucker knows the traditional meaning of monopoly and the structural differences between past and present economic conditions, he can refocus an errant discussion.
Other examples suggest themselves. In The End of Economic Man, Drucker comprehends the sense behind the seeming irrationality of fascism’s appeal by acknowledging the historical context of its ideas. According to Drucker the Great War and the Great Depression destroyed Europe’s already shaken belief in an economic system that was autonomous, governed by rational laws, and productive of both freedom and equality. With the inherited rational world view of classical economics shown to be bankrupt, fascism took powerful hold on the Europian mind precisely because it was “irrational” – that is, it offered a non economic basis for individual status and rank. Drucker reaches the heart of this twentieth-century phenomenon by appreciating the sudden irrelevance of earlier systems of thought. A similar understanding characterizes his many obiter dicta on Marxism as well as his famous essay on John Maynard Keyness. Drucker writes:
“Keynes’ work was buildon the realization that the fundamental assumptions of nineteenth-century laissex faire economics no longer hold true in an industrial society and a credit economy. But is aimed at the restoration and preservation of the basic beliefs, the basic institutions of nineteenth century laissez fair politics, above all, it aimed at the preservation of the autonomy and automatism of the market. The two could no longer be brought together in a rational system; Keynes’s policies are magic spells, formulae, and incanitations, tomake the admittedly irrational behave rationally”.
Much the same is true of Marx’s thought , which treats as a universal given conditions limited to a brief phase of industrial development.
(Excerpted from the book titled – Becoming a manager by Linda A Hill)
++++++++++
“Because a manager can profit both from the ideas and from the discipline of mind by which they are formulated – Alan M. Kantrove”
Mention the name of Peter Drucker and many an ear in the business forest stands up straight. Over the years little of concern to bysiness has fallen outside the extraordinary range of his interests, and few of those interests have escaped thoughtful, often classic exposition in his six-foot shelf of articles and books.
Such productivity is itself a professional achievement of the first order. Add to it, however, Drucker’s countless appearances in executive seminars, lecture halls, conference rooms, and classrooms; his extensive labors as a consultant; and his facility for expressing complex ideas simply and elegantly. No wonder the mention of Peter Drucker commonly guarantees attention. People listen because they respect the authority of experience – distilled, analysed, articulate and are eager to profit by it.
There are those, of course, who do not listen so attentively to Drucker. Some, especially within the academy, think him more journalist than scholar and more glib generaliser than journalist. They slight his research as no research at all and his ideas on management as unstructured and (worst sin of all) unsystematic. To their minds Drucker is an armchair philosopher who lacks practical credentials as a doer.
At one extreme they believe him neither interested nor competent on the myriad details of day-to-day business operations and therefore question the authority his judgments regularly carry.
At the other extreme Drucker’s most attentive followers, like those of many a populare thinker, grant him too much. Out-of-context snippets from his writings or conversations often app;ear in support or conversations often appear in support of contentions that he himself does not endorse. Similarly, overly ardent disciples reduce the complexity of his thought to a handful of canomical ideas that, in their doctrinaire simplicity, do violence to the original.
In point of fact, Drucker’s works lend themselves to these excesses of reaction. By relying in places on such suggestive – but incompletely wrought notions as the “contribution coefficient”. Drucker offers fertile ground for scholarly naysaying. Conversely, by striving for a pithy, ep;igrammatical style, he often plays into the hands of those who are too easily satisfied with easy phrases and hall-truths. Indeed, it is rhetorically memorable to assert, as Drucker does, that “most sales training is totally unjustified. At best it makes an incompetent salesman out of a moron”. But it also gives ready encouragement to the cavalier dismissal of a perennially knotty problem.
Sloganeering of either sort, wherever it occurs, is double-edged. Used with care, it allows for a quick, incisive thrust of thought; in the wrong hands, it becomes an effective weapon of simple or fuzzy mindedness.
The influence of ideas:
For the most part, however, Drucker’s books command attention neither for their stock of aphorisms nor for their mastery of technical computation. Ears perk up, rather, to catch the wisdom of Drucker’s animating ideas. So generally, receptive has their audience been and also longlived their influence that many of his ideas have become part and parcel of today’s commonsense understanding of business. As a result, it is snot easy even in retrospect to achieve critical distance from them.
How remarkably familiar has become his vision of modern industrial society as constituted by large-scale organizations. How obvious it now seems to regard business as the representative institution of that society, and how matter-of-fact an exercise it now is to apply to business the same models of analysis appropriate to any social or political institution.
Was there a time when people did not regularly ask of individual businesses their source of legitimate authority, their principle of organization, or their pattern of leadership ? Was there a time when management felt little need to address employees’ concerns for status and function, to fit “knowledge workers” into established structures of decision making and command, or to achieve effective communication in and among managerial levels ?
For that matter, did business ever fail to take seriously the recruitment and development of executives, the proper role of boards of directors, or the special needs of companies at different stages of development ? Did it fail to pay adequate attention to the internal logic of work itself or to those techniques by which managers can become both more efficient and more effective ? Did it ignore such fundamental questions as the nature of the business it was in and of the customers it served ?
Today it is hardly frontpage news, at least within the business community, when some executive offers a defense of profits as an objective measurement of economic performance or as an essential premium against the risks of the future. Nor is it shocking to hear a call for management to think through long-term strategy as well as to set short-term objectives. A voice recommending that business plan for innovation is no longer a voice crying out in the wilderness. That non of this seems novel – that it is all quit commonplace – is prime evidence of Drucker’s pervasive influence, direct or indirect, on managerial thought. By and large these ideas have long since won acceptance as kind of professional folk, wisdom. They have become home truths.
Drucker’s contribution:
To be sure, few of these ideas are original with Drucker. Even fewer have escaped treatment in at least a dozen management texts. Yet there is always a value in reencountering sensible thought sensibly put. But if the substance of his books is neither original nor unique, if what they offer at best is no more or less than the readily paraphrasable content of his thinking, why bother to read them ? Why, in short, read Peter Drucker and not a streamlined digest of his major ideas ?
The answer is simple: Drucker’s real contribution to managerial understanding lies not so much in the cash value of his ideas as in the rigorous activity of mind by which they are formulated. One can learn more and more deeply from watching him think than from studying the content of his thought.
Integration of thought:
Most critics assess the substantive contribution of Drucker’s works to the discipline of professional management. Yet Drucker’s thought is far more valuable for its manner than its matter. First, there is its decidedly integrative quality. To understand essential management tasks. Drucker shows by example that it is necessary to view them in context. One must appreciate the historicaluniverse of traditions and structures out of which they emerged and the culturaluniverse of norms and values in which they participate. One must know about the many forms capitalism has taken over time and the particular strengths of each form. One must be aware of competing economic ideologies and their underlying premises. In short, one must be able to recognize major shifts inhuman aspirations as well as the fixed limits of human adaptation.
Then, too, one must be sensitive to the speed, direction, and logic to those technological and demographic changes that will make the future very different form the present. One must, at the same time, carefully ascertain what in the present will last. Not least, one must supplement an understanding of management with insights from other fields of knowledge, regularly comparing it with the summary experience of other large-scale organizations and different cultures
When brought to bear on even the thorniest of problems, such integrative thinking allows Drucker to identify the key assumptions at issue, to establish their mutual relations, and to evaluate them. Consider, for instance, his lengthy discussion of the curse of bigness in Concept of the Corporation. Here Drucker avoids the needless excesses of those who argue either for or against bigness in business by tracing their operative premise to its root and showing it to be grossly misconceived.
Consciously or not, most opponents of bigness, Drucker finds, are in fact tilting against the windmills of monopoly; its defenders, protecting them. Now, monopoly and bigness are, of course, not the same thing and ought not be confused. But Drucker is able to track the point of issue still further to challenge its historical as well as its logical basis. “This theory of monopoly”, he writes, “which is still widely accepted as gospel truth, rests on the assumption – correct in the eighteenth century – that supply will always be limited, whereas demand will always be unlimited”.
This assumption does not always obtain. It may be true of some, but is not necessarily true of all, historical periods. Because Drucker knows the traditional meaning of monopoly and the structural differences between past and present economic conditions, he can refocus an errant discussion.
Other examples suggest themselves. In The End of Economic Man, Drucker comprehends the sense behind the seeming irrationality of fascism’s appeal by acknowledging the historical context of its ideas. According to Drucker the Great War and the Great Depression destroyed Europe’s already shaken belief in an economic system that was autonomous, governed by rational laws, and productive of both freedom and equality. With the inherited rational world view of classical economics shown to be bankrupt, fascism took powerful hold on the Europian mind precisely because it was “irrational” – that is, it offered a non economic basis for individual status and rank. Drucker reaches the heart of this twentieth-century phenomenon by appreciating the sudden irrelevance of earlier systems of thought. A similar understanding characterizes his many obiter dicta on Marxism as well as his famous essay on John Maynard Keyness. Drucker writes:
“Keynes’ work was buildon the realization that the fundamental assumptions of nineteenth-century laissex faire economics no longer hold true in an industrial society and a credit economy. But is aimed at the restoration and preservation of the basic beliefs, the basic institutions of nineteenth century laissez fair politics, above all, it aimed at the preservation of the autonomy and automatism of the market. The two could no longer be brought together in a rational system; Keynes’s policies are magic spells, formulae, and incanitations, tomake the admittedly irrational behave rationally”.
Much the same is true of Marx’s thought , which treats as a universal given conditions limited to a brief phase of industrial development.
(Excerpted from the book titled – Becoming a manager by Linda A Hill)
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THE PENCIL THEORY OF LIFE
THE PENCIL THEORY OF LIFE
A boy was watching his grandmother write a letter. At one point he asked: “Are you writing a story about what we have done?. Is it a story about me?” His grandmother stopped writing her letter and said to her grandson: “ I am writing about you, actually, but more important than the words is the pencil I amusing. I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up;.”
Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It did not seem very special. It was just like any other pencil he has ever seen. The grandmother then said that though the pencil looks very simple, it is endowed with five qualities – which if you can manage to hang on will make you a person who is always at peace with the world
FIRST QUALITY: You are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and he always guides us according to his will.
SECOND QUALITY: Now and then we have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he is much sharper. So you too must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because that will make you a better person
THIRD QUALITY: The pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing, it helps to keep us on the road to justice
FOURTH QUALITY: What really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.
Finally the pencil’s FIFTH QUALITY: It always leaves a mark. In just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark.
So try to be conscious of that in your every action
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A boy was watching his grandmother write a letter. At one point he asked: “Are you writing a story about what we have done?. Is it a story about me?” His grandmother stopped writing her letter and said to her grandson: “ I am writing about you, actually, but more important than the words is the pencil I amusing. I hope you will be like this pencil when you grow up;.”
Intrigued, the boy looked at the pencil. It did not seem very special. It was just like any other pencil he has ever seen. The grandmother then said that though the pencil looks very simple, it is endowed with five qualities – which if you can manage to hang on will make you a person who is always at peace with the world
FIRST QUALITY: You are capable of great things, but you must never forget that there is a hand guiding your steps. We call that hand God, and he always guides us according to his will.
SECOND QUALITY: Now and then we have to stop writing and use a sharpener. That makes the pencil suffer a little, but afterwards, he is much sharper. So you too must learn to bear certain pains and sorrows, because that will make you a better person
THIRD QUALITY: The pencil always allows us to use an eraser to rub out any mistakes. This means that correcting something we did is not necessarily a bad thing, it helps to keep us on the road to justice
FOURTH QUALITY: What really matters in a pencil is not its wooden exterior, but the graphite inside. So always pay attention to what is happening inside you.
Finally the pencil’s FIFTH QUALITY: It always leaves a mark. In just the same way, you should know that everything you do in life will leave a mark.
So try to be conscious of that in your every action
++++++++++++
NAVIGATING THE STORM
NAVIGATING THE STORM
It is said that the Eagle has got an uncanny knack to sense an approaching storm. It will fly to a vantage point and wait for the winds to come. When the storm hits, the eagle will set its wings so that the wind will pick it up and life it above the storm. While the storm rages below, the eagle will be soaring above it. In fact the eagle does not try to escape the storm. It uses the storm to catapult itself to the nimbus of glory. Many a times in our lives se will be confronted with similar debilitating storms. Are we able to become like the Eagle and use the storm to our advantage ? Or do we let the storms to overpower us ? Success lies in our ability to anticipate the impending storms and navigate it to our benefit when it strikes.
To think positively in a crisis is a challenge. But great leaders and visionaries capitalize on crisis and see it as an opportunity to develop; and enhance their survival/leadership skills. Victor Franki, a renowned Austrian Psychiatrist, through his revolutionary book – Man’s search for meaning” explains the significance of having a perpetual powerful vision to guide us in our lives. When he was subjected to the “Concentration camps” ( a gruesome methodology adopted by Adolf Hitler to wipe out the disaspora of Jews) at Auschwitz during the period from 1942-1945, he thought his world has come to an end. But under this ghastly and bestial of human existence, Victor Franki conceptualized an agenda and a vision to pull him through these torturous days. He decided this unavoidable suffering and use it to help mankind. These self inquisitions led him to develop a revolutionary theory in Psychoterapy known as – Logotherapy. It is about finding a personal meaning in life, however dismal the circumstances may be. Because of his powerful vision, Victor Franki did survive the holocaust and was later conferred with 29 honorary doctorates from universities across the globe for works on Existential Analysis and Logotherapy. It is not the burdens of life that weigh us down but it is how we handle them.
A dream is a mere notion. But when we convert it into a vision and work towards achieving it, it becomes a reality. A powerful vision is like the beacon of light on a dark hazy night. It cuts through the nebulous fog and shows us the way. BY constantly being aware of our environment and our competitors and by having a powerful personal vision, we can become like the majestic eagle which knows where it is headed even in the middle of storm.
Remember, the whole world steps aside for a person who knows where he is going.
::::::::::::::::::
“We are not limited by our abilities but by our vision – anonymous”
It is said that the Eagle has got an uncanny knack to sense an approaching storm. It will fly to a vantage point and wait for the winds to come. When the storm hits, the eagle will set its wings so that the wind will pick it up and life it above the storm. While the storm rages below, the eagle will be soaring above it. In fact the eagle does not try to escape the storm. It uses the storm to catapult itself to the nimbus of glory. Many a times in our lives se will be confronted with similar debilitating storms. Are we able to become like the Eagle and use the storm to our advantage ? Or do we let the storms to overpower us ? Success lies in our ability to anticipate the impending storms and navigate it to our benefit when it strikes.
To think positively in a crisis is a challenge. But great leaders and visionaries capitalize on crisis and see it as an opportunity to develop; and enhance their survival/leadership skills. Victor Franki, a renowned Austrian Psychiatrist, through his revolutionary book – Man’s search for meaning” explains the significance of having a perpetual powerful vision to guide us in our lives. When he was subjected to the “Concentration camps” ( a gruesome methodology adopted by Adolf Hitler to wipe out the disaspora of Jews) at Auschwitz during the period from 1942-1945, he thought his world has come to an end. But under this ghastly and bestial of human existence, Victor Franki conceptualized an agenda and a vision to pull him through these torturous days. He decided this unavoidable suffering and use it to help mankind. These self inquisitions led him to develop a revolutionary theory in Psychoterapy known as – Logotherapy. It is about finding a personal meaning in life, however dismal the circumstances may be. Because of his powerful vision, Victor Franki did survive the holocaust and was later conferred with 29 honorary doctorates from universities across the globe for works on Existential Analysis and Logotherapy. It is not the burdens of life that weigh us down but it is how we handle them.
A dream is a mere notion. But when we convert it into a vision and work towards achieving it, it becomes a reality. A powerful vision is like the beacon of light on a dark hazy night. It cuts through the nebulous fog and shows us the way. BY constantly being aware of our environment and our competitors and by having a powerful personal vision, we can become like the majestic eagle which knows where it is headed even in the middle of storm.
Remember, the whole world steps aside for a person who knows where he is going.
::::::::::::::::::
“We are not limited by our abilities but by our vision – anonymous”
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