Page 125 - The Drucker Lectures

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is still largely proved that if you get going through that appren-
ticeship at age 19, you have a very good chance of not having to
learn anything new until you retire. But knowledge work is the
exception. Change comes very rapidly.
If Socrates the stonemason—that’s how he made his living—
came and worked for one of those mason yards that make crosses
for our cemeteries, believe me, he would not have to learn much.
Most of the tools are pretty much the same, except that some of
them now have a battery. But if Socrates the philosopher came
into one of our philosophy departments today, he would not un-
derstand one single word. And I’m not saying that they’re better
than he was. But they’re totally different.
And that is typical. I just finished a few weeks ago reading a
history of the library. And the concepts of the library change ev-
ery 30 or 40 years. One of the great weaknesses of library school
is that it teaches the current technology as the permanent one,
when all experience shows that what librarians have to learn is
how to learn. Or take registered nurses. Over the last 20 or 30
years at least one thing has remained the same: the purpose. But
the way the job is done is almost beyond all recognition for a
nurse who started in 1950. Knowledge, by definition, changes
very fast. And skills, by definition, change very slowly.
This is one of the first things to say in managing. And let me
say this was probably my greatest contribution to the research
director. After we had worked on it for some time, it hit me that
his very big, very famous lab was being basically run statically.
We add discoveries, and we add insights, but we don’t change
the way we work. And once we understood it, we began to real-
ize that to overcome his bottlenecks, his frustrations—not all of
them, but some of them—he had to build in continuous feed-
back and learning. Mostly, this meant sitting down with people
and saying, “What have we learned that will force us, or will
enable us, will help us, to do things differently?”