Page 103 - The Drucker Lectures

84 [ The Drucker Lectures

Oh, some of you may be old enough to remember that I once
was considered a pioneer of human relations, which was an at-
tempt to offset somewhat the constitutionalist approach with an
approach on the formation of people. And there is organization
development. But let’s face it. Those two things haven’t worked.
They have been minor corrections. And now we will have to
look at the formation of people very seriously, simply because for
some of the problems we have to solve there is no other way.
Let me give you an example. If you look at multinationals
today, they are mostly nineteenth century in their structure,
with a parent company and with subsidiaries that manufacture
the same products for their own home market. But increasingly,
you get incestuous relationships in which the specs come out
of Detroit, the design comes out of Germany, the body comes
out of Brazil, and the transmission out of Mexico—like the
Ford Fiesta. Or if you look at IBM office products, resources
are organized not in terms of products but in terms of stages of
production with labor-intensive work done in one place, with
design done in another, with a lot of the technology done where
the technologists are.
And let me say that technologists are proving remarkably re-
sistant to migration. Those French specialists prefer to work in
a research lab near the Louvre to working in Hoboken. I can’t
figure it out, but they do. And you can’t get them to move or
even to go down to Connecticut, and so you have to do the re-
search where the researchers are. It’s no longer true as it was in
the ’50s that researchers are so badly paid in Germany or Austria
or Japan that they’ll only too gladly take that job in Peoria. They
don’t anymore. And so you will have to think through how you
organize and integrate not components but stages. The product
is then sold where the customers are, which is likely to be in de-
veloped countries. And so that subsidiary you have in France is
not a traditional one.