The Daily Drucker: January 25 – Reinvent Yourself

Knowledge people must take responsibility for their own development and placement.

In today’s society and organizations, people work increasingly with knowledge, rather than with skill.  Knowledge and skill differ in a fundamental characteristic – skills change very, very slowly.  Knowledge, however, changes itself.  It makes itself obsolete, and very rapidly.  A knowledge worker becomes obsolescent if he or she does not go back to school every three or four years.

This not only means that the equipment of learning, of knowledge, of skill, of experience that one acquires early is not sufficient for our present life time and working time.  People change over such a long time span.  They become different persons with different needs, different abilities, different perspectives, and, therefore with a need to “reinvent yourself.”  I quite intentionally use a stronger word the “revitalize.”  If you talk of 50 years of working life – and this, I think, is going to be increasingly the norm – you have to reinvent yourself.  You have to make something different out of yourself, rather than just find a new supply of energy.

ACTION POINT:  Ask those ahead of you in age how they went about “re-potting themselves.”  What steps would you take now?

Quoted from The Daily Drucker, January 25 , Page 27