Page 126 - The Drucker Lectures

Knowledge Lecture II [ 107

As some of you who are in academia know, we don’t do this
well. We basically assume the old craftsman’s assumption about
apprenticeship that, once you have gotten your Ph.D., you stop
learning and start teaching. Instead, we should be saying, “That’s
when you start helping others to learn. And that’s when you start
learning yourself.”
A knowledge-based organization has to be an entrepreneurial
organization in the sense that it always starts out to make itself
obsolete, because that is the characteristic of knowledge. It is not
the characteristic of a skill. And I’m not saying that I know how
to do it, and I’m not saying that we know how to do it. I’m say-
ing that we’re beginning to realize that this makes a tremendous
difference.
You’ve probably heard the story of the old grad who comes
back to the fortieth reunion, and the old economics prof is still
there. It is May—that’s when reunions are held—so this is final
exam time. And the grad looks at the final exam and says, “Pro-
fessor Smithers, these are the same questions you asked us 40
years ago.” And Smithers nods and says, “Yes, but the answers
are different.” We always thought it was a joke. No! This is wis-
dom. The answers to questions do not remain the same. The
answers are different, because we have learned a lot. What we
mostly learn is that the answers that gave you an “A+” 40 years
ago are the wrong answers. The way we go about solving prob-
lems has changed, because that’s what you learn. You learn to do
a little better, to push back that infinite boundary of ignorance
just a bit.
Among the implications of this is that you have to build in or-
ganized abandonment. Otherwise, you collapse under the over-
load. One of the things you learn from working with research
organizations is that they become constipated because there’s too
much. Nobody has unlimited resources. In knowledge work, you
have to start out with the need to change, to grow, to do the new,