Page 111 - The Drucker Lectures

92 [ The Drucker Lectures

We are beginning to drown in information—in data, not in-
formation. I began work almost exactly 60 years ago—it’ll be
60 years on July 1 since I started as an apprentice clerk in an
export house in Hamburg, with a quill pen. And in those days,
information was simply—well, there wasn’t any. It was a railway
timetable, and that was it. Basically, we all learned to manage
without information. And now we will have to manage with it.
It’s bred in the bones of the human race that the more infor-
mation, the better—it’s quantity that counts. But when informa-
tion is no longer scarce, believe me, you very soon learn that less
is more, and that more is most definitely less. And you learn that
quality counts, and that information is something that has to be
selected. Information is something that is pertinent to the task
that can be converted into knowledge. And knowledge is infor-
mation in action. One has to learn this.
Let me say, yes, almost any professional learns this in his or
her own area. Talk to a good, experienced physician and ask,
“What have you really learned in those 25 years since you began
to treat patients?” The answer is, “I have learned to decide what
information is relevant out of the enormous amount of data I
kind of poured into myself in medical school and my internship
and residency. And now I know how to recall what I need for
this patient.” We will learn to do this in organizations.
When you look at our information systems now, though, they
are basically totally unselective. You gather as much as you can
and distribute it to the largest possible number of people. And that
said, you don’t get information; you get data. We will have to learn
to think through: What information do I need? What is informa-
tion for me? And this is something we have never done. When I
look at my friends in institutions, they still think this is the job of
the information specialist. Well, the information specialist knows
how to get it, but he hasn’t the foggiest notion of what to get, nor
can he. And so today you have that peculiar standoff in our orga-