Author’s note: For deeper thinkers, as in Harvard Business Review, see this month’s featured article.
Peter Drucker was a professor and consultant who is often called the inventor of modern management theory. He was an early observer of such widely-accepted management concepts as MBOs (management by objective), knowledge workers, outsourcing (“do what you do best and outsource the rest”) and planned obsolescence (he termed “planned abandonment).
I worked for fourteen hours at the polls on November 3rd. It was an unforgettable experience.
About forty times a year, at the end of Vistage (CEO peer group) sessions, I say, “don’t get caught in the dressing room rewriting the script of your life. This is not a dress rehearsal, the curtain is up and this, my friends, is THE show.”
Except in sports, it doesn’t seem to me that for one side to win, the other must lose. That’s the concept of zero sum, and I’ve learned to avoid people who practice it.
Barbara Cartland said, “You become what you think. You are what you eat”. I heard a similar quote in the 1970s and it has come back to me many times since then.
Events in the lives of each of our three children are becoming opportunities for their personal reinvention. Each are facing major life changes and so they must decide who they want to become.
After reorganizing my paper clip collections during the lockdown, I decided I would finally attack the thousands of files my sisters and I have set aside over the years regarding my family’s history. My Mom and Dad kept various clips, photos and writings about their Grandparents on both sides so we can piece together roughly back to the mid-1800s.
I have become familiar with the study of heuristics over the years. If I keep it simple, heuristics are mental shortcuts that help us make decisions and judgments. I learn a lot from thinking about how I come to decisions particularly when faced with complex issues.
A student raised his hand during an MBA guest lecture some years ago and said to me, “Thanks for telling us about the barriers you overcame to succeed, but could you tell us how you overcame them?”
