How I Learn

Managing Oneself by Peter Drucker

In March 1999 management thinker Peter Drucker published an article in Harvard Business Review called Managing Oneself. Drucker, who was born in 1909 and died in 2005, published this at the age of ninety, and it distills the thoughts of an emotionally and intellectually rich life. There is much good advice here for anyone who wants to better understand, foster and share their own learning and to make it part of a successful life.

The article was recently republished in book form by Harvard Business School Press. This is a small book, only 64 pages it can be read in a few hours. But it repays close reading and thought, so I will not begrudge HBSP this repackaging. It is nice to have this in a bound form to keep handy and to give on to other people.

The key messages are

• Know ones strengths through analysis of the outcomes of ones decisions
  
• Understand how one performs, or gets things done
  
• Understand how one learns
  
• Know ones values and work in organizations that support them
  
• Know where one belongs and what one contributes
  
• Be responsible for ones relationships
  
• Plan for more than one career

Decision Records and Understanding Performance & Learning

Drucker feels that the best way to understand ones strengths is to keep a record of ones decisions. Each time you face a major life decision, write down what you have decided, what the alternatives were and what you expect the outcomes to be. Then periodically revisit the decision and see what the actual outcomes have been. Eventually you will get a feeling for what you are good at. Your decisions will improve and you will learn to focus your time and energy on what makes you successful.

I seem to be facing my fair share of decisions over the past few years, and I adopted Drucker's approach in 2005 when I left Recombo, a company I helped to found. At that time the basic decision was whether to (i) go back to school and maybe get a Ph.D., (ii) start another company, (iii) do some consulting, or (iv) take a position at a larger company. I began with the consulting as a way to defer a decision and then when an opportunity came up I joined Monitor Group, a consultancy in Cambridge MA. My goals in joining Monitor and the results to date are sketched out below.

• To see how I would perform in a larger organization
  
  So far so good, my main struggles have been with not having direct control over the larger decision making process and not having deep visibility into finances. I find both of these deeply frustrating. The learning made possible at Monitor, especially the opportunity to work with thought leaders such as Bruce Chew, Tom Nagle and my boss Jonathon Levy has been astonishing, and I am learning as quickly here as I have at any time in my life (I have zero tolerance for situations where I am not learning full tilt).
  
• To understand how big-time consulting works and see if it suits me
  
  I have learned an enormous amount about how the consulting business works and about key frameworks, especially in marketing, pricing and decision making, and how these are implemented in very large companies. Consulting itself does not really suit me as I prefer to be engaged in building teams and creating innovative products - again, this has something to do with being able to shape things directly, whereas consultants work through analysis and persuasion
  
• To experience living in the US and come to understand it better
  
  I am a committed citizen of Vancouver and am deeply engaged in the art, writing, food and music of that city. But I spent ten years of my life in Japan and have lived in Europe as well. Living in these other cultures has helped me to see Canada and Vancouver more clearly. But I lacked the perspective of our closest neighbour, which also happens to be the world's most powerful country. And we have chosen a good time live in the US: a presidential election year, during a financial crisis, with infrastructure crumbling, as the semantic web emerges from research groups like MIT (I cycle by it everyday and should spend more time interacting with researchers there), Stanford and Rensselaer and begins to be applied in real-world applications, and (I am being optimistic here) hints of a cultural rebirth can be seen in music, street art and poetry. Do I understand the US? Not sure that one can understand another person, let alone a country. But I surely have a more honest and informed perspective and a deeper affection for the people. I can also see that I want to live in Vancouver in the long-term.

Values and Contribution

If an organization does not share your values then don't work there. End stop.

Understand how you best contribute and make sure the organization supports you in contributing in that way. And if it does not, create a new job, either in the same organization, at a different organization, or somewhere you create with your partners.

I believe I best contribute to an organization in three ways

• Idea shaper and instigator - I am not sure how original my thinking is, but I have a good ability to take ideas from different disciplines and to blend them into new constellations that can be applied to solve real problems
  
• Team leader - I enjoy and think I am quite good at building teams and making each team member successful
  
• Pattern detector - I am reasonably good at spotting long-term economic, technical, social and cultural trends and injecting them into ideas I am trying to shape and teams I am trying to build

On the other hand, I am not a skilled administrator and my sales quotient is no better than average (unfortunate as I have learned to enjoy sales). I can only work effectively on a team where I can help other people to use their own strengths and cover my deficiencies.

Working with my wife, object maker and photographer Yoshie Hattori, over the past almost three decades has also helped me live into my values and contribute to our families growth. And she, quite simply, helps me to see better!

Relationships and Career

Drucker points out that most of us can and should expect to keep on working as long as we keep on living, but that most of us will not want to stay in one career for forty or fifty years. We need to build a wide net of people that will help us and guide us in our decisions over our life and these people should come from many different areas.

I invest a lot of time in my network of friends and colleagues (and I don't separate the two groups) and in meeting and talking to al sorts of different people. But I am doing less well in thinking through what an alternative career might be! Whatever it is, it will probably involve starting a company or founding a non-profit organization. Some possibilities - a store that sells odd things from every part of industry and design, a small restaurant, a company giving art tours for older people, a company giving art tours for children, a non-profit for people raising children in more than one language or for people who have no first language, an institution to research long-term patterns of all types ...

Suggestions?

 

Learning Styles and Strengths

In the previous post I looked at learning styles generally and my own in particular. And in the post before that the focus was on understanding one's strengths and using them as a way to leverage personal growth. Learning styles were defined as a person's preferred approach to accessing, organizing and applying information, with information understood widely to include things like motor and perceptual skills as well as cognitive skills and organized collections (maps) of information.

In this post I would like to blend my strengths and learning styles together to see how strengths support learning styles and learning style can be leveraged to enhance strengths.

The notion of blending is a crucial one, and one I will come back to many times. It is worth a post of its own. Blending occurs when two different concepts and experiences are brought together to create a third, new level of experience. Blending is the mental (and physical) operation that lies behind metaphor and synthesis, and is the key to how humans evolve new understandings of the world. The key texts on Blending are Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner.

So how do my strengths and my learning styles play together?

My strengths, according to the last time I went through Strengthsfinder, are

• Strategic
• Achievement
• Ideation
• Input
• Learning

My learning styles, from my own self assessment and introspection are

• Abstract
• Historical
• Written
• Modeling
• Social

I actively engage all three modes of information access - visual, verbal, motor - in all five of these learning styles. (Some people think of a visual, verbal or motor bias as a learning styles in themselves, but I have not found this construction to be useful.)

• Strategic thinking requires high-level models and an understanding of how and why things are as they are. This is necessary to effect change. My abstract, historical and modeling learning styles underlie and support my strength in strategic thinking: abstract by helping me to detect the most salient patterns in events; historical by helping me to understand the threads that led things to be as they are, and just as important, to see the ways in which they have been, could have been, and will be different; modeling is closely related to abstraction (in some cases the terms are used interchangeably) and I actively try to construct models of events and processes in order to understand and to influence them ( a habit of though that is reinforced in my current work environment, a major strategic consulting firm, in which the making and breaking of models is part of our day-to-day work).
• Achievement – the drive to excel. I spend a lot of time thinking and learning and working to apply what I am learning to test it and see if it will drive success. Though I will not always admit it, there is an element of competition in my social learning style, I like to know things and to show it, and I also like to help the people I live and work with to excel.
• Ideation – abstract thought and modeling drive new ideas, as does the urge to go back to the source and explore other paths and potentials (historical). Generating and sharing ideas through conversations is key to both learning and achievement (social). Generating, testing, and watching new ideas get selected out is woven through learning and modeling is an act of selecting what parts of the world to notice and then testing and in most cases discarding or modifying the model.
• Input. My approach to learning is input intensive (this is not always a good thing, I sometimes get caught up in the noise and fail to model successfully). I read a great deal, on-line and in book form, scan constantly, and pay close attention to my environment. It is probably attention to the environment that is the most important input to my learning. And it is here that I can best blend the visual, verbal and haptic modes of information organization. My wife has taught me through her design and photography work to pay close attention to the visual and tactile detail of the world. You can see this in her blog Itis. We even try to smell and taste the things we see and live with - the salty wet grit of the air in Boston when it warms after a snowfall (note the date of this post) helps me integrate thoughts on climate change, the physical location of Boston as on but removed from the sea, and the paths I use to cycle around the city. All forms of input, all linked back to my abstract and modeling learning styles. One of my most valuable learning tools is the social tagging site Crowdtrust, where I not only keep track of websites I am interested in, but share them with other people (social) and evolve tag clouds that are part of how I model my thoughts.
• Learning – well that it seems a bit recursive to note that my strength in learning shapes my approach to learning and that my learning styles support my strength learning. But then, recursive structures are something that fascinates me. Google’s application of recursive structures to its technical architecture is something to learn from, and one can think of Chris Argyris’s double loop learning as a form of recursive structure. And double loop learning is at once a model of learning in a social environment, is of historical significance and is something that I try to weave into my own work (I will write more on double loop learning in a later post).

Applying Strengths

Over the years I have learned that I do well by focusing on what I do best. It took me a long time to learn this. Like many people, I spent years struggling to succeed by overcoming my numerous shortcomings - I prefer to begin things rather than to conclude them, I am not detail oriented, I have strong spatial pattern recognition but only average temporal pattern recognition and so on. Oh yes, I have terrible hand-efe coordination, but excellent balance and well beond average lung capacity. These days, I try to lead teams where other people make up for my weaknesses and I can concentrate on what I do best.

The first time I became aware of the philosophy that one should know what one does well and then do that was from management guru Peter Drucker (there is really no better word for this wonderful man). Drucker was a banker early in his life and then a journalist. He was not particularly successful at either profession and it was not until he honed in on the study of management that he was able to make a real contribution to human thought and activity. For much of his life Drucker kept a record of major decisions he had made and would review these decisions periodically to see what the outcomes had been. One of the decisions he repeatedly went back to and reinforced was the move from working in organizations to studying them.

This idea has been popularized in books by Marcus Buckingham and his colleagues, such as Now, Discover Your Strengths. The book is based on many years of research by Gallup which has developed a test instrument called Strengthsfinder to help people discover and understand their own strengths. I tend to be skeptical about such survey driven instruments, I have studied test design and generally find tests of this sort easy to game. But then, as the goal is to better understand myself, the only person who who would lose by gaming this system would be me! So I have used it several times in good faith, and I have also encouraged people who work with me and my family to use it give them a frame of reference for their own life decisions. And I have found it helps a great deal to get a bearing on ones own strengths and to understand those of the people around you.

On my last run through (I plan to do this again using the new version at some point this year) my strengths were as follows:

• Strategic
• Achievement
• Ideation
• Input
• Learning

These come as no surpise to people who know me.

I have been working to understand these strengths for several years now and have developed my own interpretations of what they mean to me.

Strategic: I look for patterns, long-term patterns, and the points in the pattern that have the potential for change.

Achievement: I am competitive and want to win. And I want what I win to have some significance, at least in my own eyes and for my immediate circle. Ideally, I want what I do to have some impact for the better.

Ideation: Ideas matter, generating them, sharing them, investigating them and seeing them become real.

Input: High bandwidth absorption and processing of large amounts of information, sorting them, and sending them back out. (How else to see larger patterns? Someone with different strengths might say through contemplation and deep thought.)

Learning: Well, I am trying to understand learning more deeply in this blog!

I have found these strengths apply pretty generally to how I live my life. Take cycling. Over the past few years I have become a hardcore urban commuter cyclist (through downtown Boston, up and down the Charles River for some extra distance, and over into Cambridge MA where I work). And I am working up to longer distances, I rode a century (160 KM) on my fixed gear last year and want to do a one-day ride of at least 200 KM (again on my fixie) this year. I am learning as much as I can about bicycles and cycling, from the design of the bike to the biophysics of performance and endurance (learning and input). I ride hard, don't like to be passed, and always try to go a bit longer and a bit harder (achievement). I plan my rides both daily and over the course of the year, trying to design rides that have a good rhythm and that explore the physical structure of Eastern Massachusetts (strategic). And I enjoy talking to my friends about their ideas and experiences of cycling and looking for better ways to hydrate or to build stamina and strength--interval training anyone?(ideation).

So over the course of this blog, I will be turning these strengths in on themselves, and using them to better understand how people learn, how it shapes their lives and communities, and how it contributes to a more connected society (connected into longer patterns of time and space, connected across cultures, and connections between people).