THE MAN WHO INVENTED
MANAGEMENT
HOW DO I PERFORM?
Anazingly few people know they get things done. Indeed, most of us do not even know that different people work and perform differently. Too many people work in ways that are not their ways, and that almost guarantees nonperfomance. For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?
Like one´s strengths, how one performs is unique. It is a matter of personality. Whether personality be a matter of nature or nurture, it surely is formed long before a person goes to work. And how a person performs is a given, just as what a person is good at or not good at is a given. A person´s way of perfoming can be slightly modified, but it is unlikely to be completely changend and certaimly not easily. Jusdt as people achieve results by doing what they are good at, they also achieve results by working in ways thast they best perform. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs.
HOW DO I PERFORM?
The first to know is whether you are a reader or a listner. Far too few people even know that there are readers and listeners and that people are rarely both. Even fewer know which of the two they themselves are. But some examples will show damaging such ignorance can be.
When Dwight Eisenhower was Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, he was the darling of the press. His press conferences were famous for their style-General Eisenhower showed total command of whatever question he was asked, and he was able to describe a situation and explain a policy in two or three beautifully polished andelegant sentences. Ten years later, the same journalist who had been his admirers held President Eisenhower in open contempt.
He never addressed the qusstions, they complained, but rambled on endlessly abut something else. And they constabtly ridiculed him for butchering the King´s English in incoherent and ungrammatical answers.
Eisenhower apparently did not know that he was a reader, not a listener. When he was Supreme Commander in Europe, his aides made sure that every question from the press was presented in writing at least half an hour before a conference was to begin. And then Eisenwower was in total command. When he became president, he succeeded two listeners, Roosevelt and Truman. Both men knew themselves to be listeneres and both enjoyed free-for-all press conferences. Eisenhower may have felt that he had to do what his two predecessors had done. As a result, he never heard the questions journalist asked. And Eisenhower is not even an extreme case of a nonlistener.
A few years laters, Lyndon Johnson destroyed his presidency, in large measure, by not knowing that he was a listener. His predecessor, J.F. Kennedy, was a reader who had assembled a brillant group of writers as his assistants, making sure that they wrote to him before discussing their memos in person. Few listeners can be made, or can make themselves, into competent readers and vice versa. The listener who tries to be a reader will, therefore, suffer the fate of Johnson, whereas the reader who tries to be a listener will suffer the fate of Einsehower. They will not perform or achieve.
Peter Drucker