Page 106 - The Drucker Lectures

Managing Large Organizations [ 87

in terms of our credit structure. Now, we are not as bad as the
Japanese where the better you do in school, the bigger your em-
ployer has to be. We don’t believe that bigger is better and very
big is best, but we’ve gotten pretty close to it. We are told that the
bright ones want to go into small business. That’s what they say.
But when you look at where they are three years later, they are all
with Citibank, and for good reasons. Citibank can afford people
who don’t earn their keep yet. Citibank can afford that overhead,
and that little entrepreneur with $2 million in sales can’t. But he
also has no time to train anybody. He has to throw them in, and
also they learn the wrong things. One has to learn system.
Before you can say what we violate in the system, you have to
master it. You can’t write free verse until after you have learned
to write a sonnet. I once studied composition with one of the
most advanced of modern composers [the Austrian] Anton We-
bern. (I almost became a musician.) And I thought he would
let me write the kind of stuff he wrote. And he said, “My dear,
Peter, you are taking liberty with the variation form. [Joseph]
Haydn gets it after 30 years. First of all, you will never be a
Haydn, and you have been at it 30 days.” And I had to learn to
write the orthodox variation. And then, after I had done that for
a year badly, he said, “Now, maybe you can take one liberty, but
be careful.” And, I brought it in, and he said, “I was wrong. You
aren’t ready yet.” And he was right.
And, that’s why students go to the GEs and the IBMs: not
only because they pay better, but also because they have a train-
ing program. We have been amazingly effective at having small
entrepreneurs, and yet, when you look at the things that need to
be done, an enormous amount must come out of existing, large
organizations simply because the capital needs, the people needs,
and the planning needs are so great.
So, how do you organize your entrepreneurial within the
managerial? Again, the answer is largely not structure but peo-