Page 192 - The Drucker Lectures

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Manage Yourself and

Then Your Company

1996

ll management books, including those I have written, focus
Aon managing other people. But you cannot manage other
people unless you manage yourself first.
The most crucial and vital resource you have as an executive
and as a manager is yourself; your organization is not going to
do better than you do yourself. So the first thing to say about a
country like yours or companies like those represented in this
room today is: development. That is a very general term. De-
velopment is, foremost, dependent on how much you get out of
the one resource that is truly under your own command and
control—namely, yourself.
When I look at all the organizations I have worked with over
a long life, there is a difference between the successful ones and
the great majority that are, at best, mediocre. The difference
is that the people who are running the successful ones manage
themselves. They know their strengths—and it is amazing how
few people really know what they are good at.
Most of the people I know who have done an outstanding
job—and the number is not very large—have systematically or-
ganized finding out what they are really good at. You do it, by the
way, by using a very old method that has nothing to do with mod-

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