Drucker Thursday: Reinvent Yourself
Knowledge workers need to go back to school every three to four years
If you are just reading this, check out the previous articles on Drucker’s Theory of the Business, previous Drucker Thursday on Identifying the Future and my Drucker journey.
Drucker coined the term Knowledge worker and wrote extensively on the challenge for individual knowledge workers, the changing nature of management due to this and what this means for society.
Today, we discuss the need to re-invent yourself as a knowledge worker.
In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill. Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic—skills change very, very slowly. Knowledge, however, changes itself. It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly. A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.
This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of
skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time. People change over such a long time span. They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore, with a need to “reinvent themselves.” I quite intentionally use a stronger word than “revitalize.” If you talk of fifty years of working life—and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm—you have to reinvent yourself. You have to make something different out of yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy. [Drucker on Asia, from Daily Drucker 25th January]
Drucker himself stands as an example of this. Katharina Pick writes:
Peter Drucker not only wrote about reinvention and taught it, but he also lived it by following a lifelong passion. When he moved to Claremont as a professor at age 63, he did so to teach Japanese Art History. This was before he founded the country’s first executive MBA program at Claremont Graduate University. He filled his life with diverse interests and people, which stimulated his thinking. Given the impact of his writings on management, many people might not realize that he wrote two-thirds of this work afterhe came to Claremont, in the last three decades of his life.
Peter Drucker’s life should serve as a reminder that the best may in fact be yet to come.
Readers Pointers: What steps are you taking to re-invent yourself? When did you last learn something totally new? How are the next three to four years going to effect you?