Managing Yourself

To do things well, you’ll need to cultivate a deep understanding of yourself – not only what your strengths and weaknesses are, but also how you learn, how you work with others, what your values are, and where you can make the greatest contribution.

First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results.Second, work on improving your strengths. Analysis will rapidly show where you need to improve skills or acquire new ones. It will also show gaps in your knowledge – and those can usually be filled. Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it.

It is equally essential to remedy your bad habits.One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence.

Questions to ask yourself:
Am I a reader or a listener?
How do I learn?
Do I work well with people, or am I a loner?
Do I produce results as a Decision Maker or as an advisor?
Do I perform well under stress or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment?
Do I work best in a big organization or a small organization?
What are my values?
Where do I belong?
What should I contribute?

Excerpts from Peter Drucker's Managing Yourself

Consumer mindscape

In yesterday's Economic Times, Professor S.Ramesh Kumar, has written on Addressing consumer mindscape.
He mentions that brands over a period of time need to enlarge the band of consumers in categories that are low involvement in nature or bought without much deliberations.
In several categories of fast-moving brands, the mindscape of the consumer extends beyond the positioning of brands. Brands need to have a clear focus based on the consumption patterns of consumers.
We need to keep asking which unmet demand of the customer can be easily met by us, and what additional factor may give extra value to the customer.

C K Prahalad

The whole world was shocked when C K Prahalad passed away on April 16th.He created a history in becoming the first person to write a piece of article for Harvard Business Review from ICU.In his column in the HBR June 2010, he writes about "Why is it so hard to tackle the obvious"?"He talks about questioning the logic used by employees of successful companies. He tells that during corporate transformation forgetting curve is more important than the learning curve.

Aim of this blog

Hi all,
In this blog, I would like to share my ideas about vision, strategy, leadership, management annd personal development. I would like to keep it short (about 5 to 10 sentences). I am planning to post one new entry every week.
I want to keep it short and focus on questions which would help in triggering thought process which could lead to improved decisioins which executives make on day-to-day basis.
Please do write to me at muralidhara.kempasagara@gmail.com for your feedback on the snippets.
Thanks,
Murali