Page 110 - The Drucker Lectures

11

The Information-Based

Organization

1987

t’s a great honor to speak under the auspices of the Ency-
Iclopædia Britannica, if only because, as some of you know,
I’ve always believed—a very old-fashioned belief—that it is the
responsibility of the man of learning and knowledge to make it
effective and to disseminate it. The tendency that the less acces-
sible you are, the more you know, is a despicable and very recent
heresy and counterproductive. And so I am very greatly honored
to talk under the auspices of the oldest and most distinguished
disseminator of information and knowledge, which has done so
very much over these 200-plus years to further education and
self-improvement and information.
And it is only fitting that my topic is the information-based
organization. By now, everybody has a computer, and I spent
last week up in Boston with my oldest daughter, whose old-
est son is now going to college. And I said to him, “Have you
picked your typewriter yet?” He gave me a look that would have
killed me if I was that typewriter. “I need a mainframe con-
trol data computer,” he said. He won’t get one. His mother’s
finances don’t quite stretch that far. But by now, everybody has
a desktop, and so all of you can now put your wife’s laundry list
on the computer.

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