Be the CEO of Your Own Life

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“In effect, managing oneself demands that each knowledge worker think and behave like a chief executive officer.” - Peter Drucker, “Managing Oneself,” Harvard Business Review, March-April 1999

Thinking of yourself as the CEO of your own life has multiple, kaleidoscopic implications. It is a never-ending discipline, requiring self-knowledge, introspection, and contemplation, and the willingness to take personal responsibility for your actions and decisions. Inside and outside of the workplace, decisions are approached not in a vacuum or in isolation. Decisions must be holistic, taking into account not just yourself but implications for others.

This means being a responsible steward of your personal (and, if applicable, organizational) assets and resources; intellectual, financial, and otherwise. The process should be the result of gathering the right amount of relevant information and, if necessary, getting input from others and involving them in the decision-making process.

If you are thinking and acting like a responsible CEO, you are basing your decisions on how they affect not only you but a broad range of constituencies: your organization, profession or industry, your family and friends. It may mean thinking years into the future, based on what action you take now. The future unfolds partly because of what is happening everywhere right now: the decisions, thoughts, and actions made by ourselves and others.

In his 1974 book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Drucker writes: "Decision making is a time machine that synchronizes into a single time—the present—a great number of divergent time spans.”

A Decision Is a Judgment

Decision making appears often in Drucker's work. For instance, “Effective Decisions” is the final chapter of his classic 1967 book The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done. At the beginning of the chapter, Drucker states: "A decision is a judgment. It is a choice between alternatives. It is rarely a choice between right and wrong. It is at best a choice between 'almost right' and 'probably wrong.'…" Later in the chapter he lists elements of the process, the final two being: “The building into the decision of the action to carry it out,” and “the feedback that tests the validity and effectiveness of the decision against the actual course of events.”

In the early 2000s, when I first began researching what became my first book, Living in More Than One World: How Peter Drucker's Wisdom Can Inspire and Transform Your Life, I spoke with a number of people who studied under Drucker at The Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. One of the most intriguing ideas I heard came from Synthia Laura Molina, founder and managing partner of the advisory firm Central IQ. Drucker told her class to think about how some decisions can affect not only immediate stakeholders and the wider community but also how they might affect humankind.

Sometimes decisions can be agonizing, as in his long-time concept of “systematic abandonment,” in which you ask yourself: If you were not already engaged in a particular activity, knowing what you know now, would you start doing it now, based on your experience/results? The hard part comes next: If the answer is no, how should you proceed? Drucker saw value in understanding and facing your current reality, whatever that is, and especially if it is not what you’d like it to be.

Making Difficult Personal Decisions

A couple of Drucker’s difficult personal decisions in particular had significant career implications. In his 1999 book Management Challenges for the 21st Century, (which contains a version of the “Managing Yourself” article), Drucker relates a major decision he made when he was in his 20s and living in London after graduate school. He was an asset manager at a bank and doing quite well.

He decided that his values lay in working with people in a much different manner than at the bank. He quit the job, even though it was during the Depression. In 1937 he and his wife emigrated to New York City, where he took the first steps to his eventual career as a writer, professor, and consultant.

Another personal/professional decision had less of an effect on Drucker’s career but was nonetheless important to how he would express his creativity in the final 20 years of his life. For many years, he had a desire to write novels. Two were published when he was in his 70s and long established as a nonfiction author: The Last of All Possible Worlds (1982) and The Temptation to Do Good, two years later.

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Neither did particularly well critically or commercially, and both were out of print for many years, until 2016, when an independent publisher reissued both books together as a paperback.

When I interviewed Drucker at his home in Claremont, California, in 2003, I asked if he would write novels again. His poignant, almost mystical reply: “It decided; I had no idea. I lived with the characters of those two novels for many years before I wrote the novels. I don’t live with any characters [now].”

The Crucial Psychological Shift

Being the CEO of your own life may be the crucial psychological shift that eases the process of taking ownership and responsibility for your most important decisions. Keep in mind the potential effects on you and others, gather the necessary information, involve other people when needed, and pay attention to how well your decisions work out. Then move on to your next decision!