Page 121 - The Drucker Lectures

102 [ The Drucker Lectures

tion. The answer is both. If all you do is have something hap-
pen, and nothing happens to you, you haven’t really learned.
And if something only happens to you, you are not really using
the knowledge. And so the question is: How do we take those
people we hope have learned something, who have information,
and how do we make them effective?
The first thing to say is that we can’t make them effective
the way we make the hourly worker effective. For one thing, if
they are any good, they know a great deal more about their job
than the boss does. A hospital administrator would get rid, very
fast, of a physical therapist director who didn’t know a great deal
more about physical therapy than he or she does. This is not a
field in which you want dilettantes. The professionals do enough
damage. And the same is true of X-ray, and of the medical lab,
and of the floor nurse, and of your market researchers, and of
your metallurgists, and, I hope, of your salespeople. And so the
idea of “do as I tell you to” is nonsense, simply because we don’t
know what to tell them. They have to know.
The next thing to say is that schooling gives people self-
confidence and mobility. It gives them horizon. We had a very
serious—don’t call it “recession”—depression 10 years ago in
’81–’82. In the smokestack industries it was a more severe de-
pression than 1932. But unemployment was amazingly low, even
in Youngstown. What explains it? The only answer is that the
older people had retired, and the younger people had a high
school education, which they did not have in the Great Depres-
sion. And they had mobility and horizon. Even if that’s through
a TV set, they have seen the entire world. They have horizon.
They don’t have to work for you. Sure, they need a paycheck. But
let me say they all know that there are lots of jobs out there.
I still hear friends of mine in business talking about loyalty
and so on. Don’t. Accept the fact that your job has to be of value
to the employee. The paycheck is part of it, but only part of it.