Page 127 - The Drucker Lectures

108 [ The Drucker Lectures

to run very fast with something that opens up. And you can only
do that if you make resources available by freeing them from
where there are no longer results.
Another thing we need is specialization. Most human beings
excel at one thing at most, and not very many excel even at one.
And very few people excel at more than one. And I don’t think
you’ll find anybody who excels at three. Yet, at the same time,
the computer programmer produces nothing by himself. Results
are interdisciplinary.
So, yes, you have to be a specialist. But knowledge has another
very peculiar characteristic, which is that the important new ad-
vances do not come out of the specialist’s discipline. They come
from the outside. It makes no difference what you look at. Every
one of the things that have transformed the discipline of his-
tory, for instance, came from outside—from psychoanalysis and
psychology, from economics, from population statistics, from ar-
chaeology. These are all things that no historian, during the time
I went to school, ever heard of. And if he did, he was told by his
prof, “Look, you study to learn how to read a document in the
archives. That’s difficult enough.” The same is true when you
look at the forebears of the computer. Very little of it is computer
ancestry. Most of it came from other disciplines. Or look at the
Mazda Miata, which has its American design center someplace
in Orange County. Where did those impulses, those ideas, come
from? Not one came out of automotive design. They came from
metallurgy, they came from material science, because that car is
made with composite materials and plastics and what have you—
from all kinds of things that I’m reasonably sure no automotive
engineer ever learned in class.
So how do you organize for this—the fact that you must have
a discipline as a basis, but you also have to organize an aware-
ness of the meaning of things that happen on the outside? A
discipline is a necessary container, but it’s temporary—very tem-