Are You Ready for Your Strategic Profile?

Here is this month’s piece from Brand Velocity, an Atlanta-based consulting firm that is putting Peter Drucker’s ideas into practice at major corporations.

My firm has worked on large reinvention initiatives inside major corporations for more than a decade, and I know that many things matter if you’re going to achieve success. Among them: having the right technology, the right management structure and the right controls to provide steady feedback.

Nothing, though, matters more than getting the right people in the right positions.

But for that to happen, people have to understand themselves. In the age of knowledge work, Peter Drucker observed, “most of us, even those of us with modest endowments, will have to learn to manage ourselves. We will have to learn to develop ourselves. We will have to place ourselves where we can make the greatest contribution.”

My firm’s experience has shown that people are typically wired in one of four ways. As was explained in my book Reinvent Your Enterprise, much of which draws on Drucker’s wisdom, some of us are Envision people—with a penchant for solving problems through intuitive thinking. Others are Design people, who prefer to tackle challenges through systematic planning. Still others are Build people, who have a knack for organizing work into repeatable processes. Finally, there are Operate people, who are at their best when they are living in the moment and capitalizing on opportunities in a more unstructured way.

Business functions follow a similar pattern. For example, marketing is an Envision function, accounting is a Design discipline, manufacturing is Build oriented, and sales falls into the Operate area.

With this backdrop, do you know where you get your energy? Many people don’t.

But once you do, it can make all the difference. As one of my mentors, Shaun Higgins, who is on the board of the Swiss food giant Aryzta, taught me, if you love what you do you never have to go to work.

So, where can you start? My Strategic Profiling survey is based on Drucker principles and designed to help individuals and groups see how to use their personal energy and abilities to maximum advantage.

It’s free, and you will get your results immediately. To begin, just click here.

Simply by knowing where you fit within the Envision-Design-Build-Operate paradigm, you can better understand your work preferences and abilities—and, in turn, use that as a first step toward improving your productivity as a knowledge worker.

— Jack Bergstrand