Page 164 - The Drucker Lectures

Do You Know Where You Belong? [ 145

work really is. It isn’t being popular. It is being considerate, and
not using people just as tools but as people.
Another skill: Make sure that before you are in your forties
you have a real outside activity. Not just a hobby but an activ-
ity. First, it creates an entirely different network. I teach a fairly
large executive management class—about 60 people. A number
of them are from the aerospace industry, which has been very
turbulent for three years now. And at least half of them have had
to change jobs. And so I said, “How did you get that new job?”
You’d be surprised how many of them say, “Marianne and I be-
long to that church and we are volunteers together. And when
that big aircraft company laid me off, it was through the other
volunteers in that church that I immediately found leads.” It’s
another network. And it is one very powerful one, by the way.
But that is the lesser importance. Its major importance is
what it does to keep you alive and to enrich you. Believe me, very
few jobs still have challenges after 20 years. The worst are those
brilliant young college professors who begin to teach French his-
tory at age 28 and love it and are excited and bubble over, and
every day is sheer joy. And 50 years later, they’re bored even by
their own jokes. And so is the class. And that’s when people say
they’re burned out. No, they’re not. They’re bored. They need
another challenge.
There are two kinds of challenges. The more important—and
the easier—one is what I have come to call the parallel career.
In this country, half of our adults work as a volunteer for at least
three hours in a nonprofit agency of some sort. And for many,
this is no longer addressing envelopes. They run their church.
They run the training program for the Girl Scout Council. They
design the training program. This is an unpaid management job,
an executive job. In some cases, it offers more responsibility than
what they have at the bank or the insurance company or in the
trucking company. And it keeps them alive. It’s a new challenge.