Page 120 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture I [ 101

cadavers and got five bucks per cadaver. Today, hospitals have
four employees per patient. And probably 80 percent of them are
not unskilled bottle washers and people who clean the rooms.
They are highly trained, highly educated paramedics. The same
is true of the university, for better or worse. When I first knew
American colleges, nobody had a vice president for development
or a placement officer. We had a faculty, period. I’m not saying it
was better or worse—it was different.
And so we are at a very big turning point. Yes, you have tra-
ditional industrial workers. Yes, you have service workers. But
that’s not where the growth in employment has been. And that’s
not where your management problems and challenges are. They
are with people who do knowledge work—some very highly
skilled, some quite unskilled.
It isn’t true that all knowledge work is skilled, and it isn’t true
that all of it requires a Ph.D. Knowledge work, by definition, is
work that you can only do by applying things that can only be
learned, or best be learned, in a formal education process. That
file clerk of yours is not the most skilled worker, but nobody
has ever learned the alphabet by intuition. True mathematicians
learn the multiplication table by perception; they see it. The rest
of us, if we’ve learned it at all—and I’m not going to ask for a
show of hands—learn it by drill. And that’s knowledge work. It
has to be acquired in the formal process.
Let me also say that it is knowledge only if it is applied.
We in academia think that knowledge is something you learn
in the classroom. No. Information—and, we hope, the ability
to learn—is acquired in the classroom. What’s in our books is
erudition. It’s when you take it and do something with it, when
something happens, that it turns to knowledge.
The oldest debate in Western history is that between Socrates
and the sophists about whether knowledge is what changes the
person, or knowledge is something that you use for external ac-