Week 49 of 52. Welcome to Drucker Mondays, a 52-week journey through the book, A Year with Peter Drucker: 52 Weeks of Coaching for Leadership Effectiveness, by Joseph A. Maciariello. Each Monday, we feature a Drucker fan and his or her favorite snippet from the week's topic. (Subscribe on this page.) David Schmidt is our guest writer today.
Week 49: You Become a Person by Knowing Your Values
THE BIG IDEA FROM THE BOOK: If you surrender your values you end up losing your self-esteem. This “progressive discomfort,” as Joseph Maciariello states in the book, can haunt us every day and erode our values, not just in our workplaces, but in our lives as well.
DAVID SCHMIDT'S FAVORITE DRUCKER INSIGHTS from Week 49, pages 375-380:
• “You become a person by knowing what your values are, what you contribute, and it is outside yourself.”
• “There is sometimes a conflict between a person’s values and the same person’s strengths. What one does well—even very well—and successfully may not fit one’s value system.”
DAVID SCHMIDT'S COLOR COMMENTARY:
We don’t do in life what we believe, we do what we value.
We all believe many things about our faith, our role as leaders, a healthy diet and exercise, being a spouse, a dad, a friend.
Big deal.
Check your calendar, checkbook, recent conversations and thought life for the real truth. One writer in the Bible, James, pointed out that even the demons “believed” in one God—but they certainly didn’t live that way. To Drucker’s point, we become who we are designed to be by knowing and living out our values. Our lives are a record of what we value.
THIS WEEK'S QUOTES & COMMENTARY BY DAVID SCHMIDT:
David Schmidt is president of J. David Schmidt & Associates. He notes, “We help our clients explore and develop strategies ‘off the map’ so they can better achieve a different kind and level of results. Email him at [email protected] or visit his website.
TO-DO TODAY:
Tomorrow morning as you get ready to start the day, stand in front of your mirror and stare for at least a minute. This is the face your mom looked into the day you were born, the face others around you see every day. Now ask yourself, “What am I feeling about the person I know behind that face? Am I satisfied with the way that person is living out their values?” That is the test question for us all.
Read Bob Buford's Halftime: Moving from Success to Significance (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition), with a foreword by Jim Collins (published this month with more than 750,000 previously sold).
NEXT MONDAY:
On Dec. 14, 2015, watch for the color commentary by Tashawna Gordon (a 2015 summer intern at Murdock Trust) on "What Do You Want to Be Remembered For?” (Week 50), the seventh chapter in the book’s final section, “Character and Legacy.”
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