Page 112 - The Drucker Lectures

The Information-Based Organization [ 93

nizations between the information specialists and the executives,
in which each side basically thinks the other one is—well, not just
stupid, that wouldn’t be so bad—but malicious and prone to sabo-
tage. And the information specialist is more nearly right than the
executive, because it is only the executive who can think through,
“What do I need for this job of mine? What is information out of
this enormous amount of data? What is relevant?”
Sure, the information specialist may then say, “Look, Mr.
Vice President, you can’t get it that way. You have to get it some
other way.” Or he may say, “This I can give you. And this I can
give you in the form in which you are used to getting it. And this
I can only give you in some other form.” Or: “This I can only
give you approximately. And this I can’t give you at all.” That’s
his job, where it is the job of the executive to think through
“What information do I need?”
And now we have to do it because we have big organizations
and big information systems. We have to design them and focus
them and concentrate them on what we need out of the chaos of
facts, the universe of facts, so that it becomes information and
our tool.
One could have asked in 1870, “What is the most success-
ful large human organization around?” And the answer would
probably have been the British in India. They’d been there for
100 years by then. They ran the subcontinent, but they never
had more than 1,000 people and no level of management at all.
There was the assistant district commissioner way out in the
jungle. He was the nearest English-speaking person 60 miles
away, before the telegraph, let alone the railway. And then there
was the lieutenant governor in Bombay or Madras or Calcutta,
and no one in between except the traveling auditor, traveling
inspector. And they did very well, even though they were green
kids, 25 or 26 years old, without any training—something the
British never believed in, as you know.